An ill-conceived excursion leads to disaster in Central America’s remote Darién jungle.
 
            In the winter of 2000, a washed-out charter boat captain, James Spring, escapes from his rut in Margaritaville to embark on the extreme adventure of a lifetime:  an overland trek through the forbidden reaches of the Darién Gap, the seventy-five-mile stretch of untamed jungle that separates Panama from Colombia.
            Spring knows well the dangers of the region, or at least he's studied the headlines.  Pitted against one another in the least civil of wars are the nation's impoverished guerrillas, wealthy cocaine cartels, and the violent henchmen of Colombia's elite.  Far beneath the radar of the international press, though, this forty-year war has spilled over the border into the restricted territory of southern Panama, where Colombia's rebels have beaten a retreat from the sophisticated weapons of a phantom right-wing movement.
            Indian villages are burned to the ground.  Missionaries disappear.  Citizens are executed with bullets that appear distinctly American.  But the Darién seems to guard its secrets at all costs.
            Into this darkest of jungles, Spring carries demons of his own, and a past that threatens to reclaim him.  Accompanied only by his deckhand and a vague map of landmarks long since destroyed, Spring charges blindly into an area where primitive native settlements have been forgotten by time, and jaguars still rule the night; a place where pain and loss are traded like commodities.  Disregarding all omens, the two Americans push headlong into forces that threaten to destroy them. 
            Crossing the Gap tells the tragic tales of a long war that has lost all sense of purpose, and of a man who finds one in the most unlikely of places.

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