Named one of the top 100 Indie novels of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews“A vividly described journey through Peru’s underbelly as the narrative gains momentum, hurtling toward a dramatic climax.”…Kirkus ReviewsThe Truth Can Be DeadlyIn 1987, the dirty war that will last twelve years and kill thirty thousand Peruvians finally reaches up through the Andean cloud forest for Nina and her family. Nina’s … and her family. Nina’s father is shot by soldiers, her mother raped, and her brother lost to the shadowy ranks of Shining Path guerrillas. And when Agustín Malqui, the village pastor, files a legal complaint against the military, it’s no surprise when he disappears in the middle of the night—just another casualty of the military regime.
Twenty-odd years later, Nina, now an officer in Cuzco’s tourist police, comes across a familiar name on the police printer that she scans daily for any trace of her long-lost brother. Agustín Malqui is alive. After spending years in a political prison, the broken pastor has been wandering the country, saving souls and drowning his demons in pisco. Nina tracks him down, only to lose him yet again in a police sweep of political malcontents. But before Malqui disappears, he tells her a drunken tale she can scarcely believe: that her brother Miguel is still alive.
Despite warnings and threats from her chief and the pleadings of her lover, an officer in Peru’s anti-terrorist branch, Nina presses on to find Malqui. Her search takes her through Peru’s underworld, from remote villages high in the Andes to the steaming jungle haunts of the narcotraficantes, and ultimately to a secret political prison in the altiplano, where she learns the truth about Malqui and her own vanished brother.
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Not my type of book at all.
Great read just too short.
Quite a short history of the Shining Path and narco trafficking. Characters with Character, hard to make up. Don’t look for happy ending.
This book shows the good and the bad in both relations between government and its citizens and within the family unit. More truth than fiction. Gritty.
Use of foreign language terms with ought a glossary was distracting.
Not your run of the mill suspense. But refreshingly good.
Read a few chapters but just couldn’t get in to this book. Sorry
The characters, in particular, are so real that I began to care about them like friends. This, despite the building of a world within the rubric of South American politics and crime that I was learning about for the first time. Fascinating, absorbing, beautifully-written with imagery and authentic details of the setting.