Christopher Marquis, 43; Novelist, Former Reporter for N.Y. Times

Christopher Marquis, 43, a novelist and former reporter for the New York Times whose specialty was Latin American politics, died Friday in San Francisco of AIDS.

Born in Kentfield, Calif., Marquis graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in literature and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1998 and 1999.

Marquis started his journalism career as an intern at the Baltimore Sun in 1982.

He later freelanced in Argentina for the paper La Nacion and was hired by the Miami Herald in 1987.

He eventually became chief foreign affairs writer for the Knight-Ridder chain, which includes the Herald. In Latin America, he covered the U.S.-led invasion of Panama, the guerrilla offensive in El Salvador and the fall of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

In 2000, he joined the New York Times, where he was a reporter in its Washington bureau. His first novel, “A Hole in the Heart,” was published in 2003 to generally favorable reviews. The book told the story of a young teacher in Alaska coping with the death of her husband. He was working on a second novel at the time of his death.