The Crackerjack Chronicles: Market Melt Down

None of this happened. There is no mercado. No scroll. No receipt. No court. And the papaya is a complete fabrication. What there is: a list. Three lines, in Mi Amor's small even handwriting, underlined twice. Cilantro. Avocados. The good cheese. No substitutions, absolutely none. He was gone four hours. He did not come back with groceries. Somewhere between the herbs and the register he said one perfectly innocent word out loud - next to a nervous vendor, a pyramid of pesos, and forty strangers who all had opinions. What follows is a financial crisis conducted entirely in produce: a rumour that outran him down three aisles, a currency that was never in any trouble whatsoever, and one papaya that did not survive the morning. A comic novel about the absurd beauty of expat life on the Riviera Maya, where a man can lose a market, a reputation and a wedge of cheese before lunch. The peso was never in danger. He was. Book Two of The Crackerjack Chronicles.