A YEAR OF FAVOR

Powerful first fiction about an ambitious American journalist, working as a foreign correspondent in a Central American country in the 1980's, who's torn between her passion for truth and her equally intense, if darker, attraction to the head of the new junta. Elizabeth Guerrera, graduate of Columbia Journalism School, recipient of numerous minority grants, reporter for the august Herald-Sun, has been working her home beat of the South Bronx for six years when she gets her big break and is assigned to Bellavista, a Massachusetts-sized, coffee-producing country in Central America. But as Guerrera telexes her stories to New York and dreams of a front page byline, she must also grapple with some disturbing realities in this frangipani-scented paradise. There's the massacre of Aguas Oscuras and the dismissal of Alan Hartwell, her Herald-Sun predecessor, whose coverage of the incident had angered the State Department. There's the crazy gringa Mary Healey, a former Connecticut-debutante-turned-liberation-theologist midwife, who accuses Guerrera of regurgitating the lies of the junta. Finally, there's General Victor Rivas Valdez, the charismatic, 44-year-old minister of defense who wines, dines, and seduces the spirited, Spanish-surnamed journalist. Guerrera, who hopes to use Valdez to uncover the truth of Aguas Oscuras, discovers a formidable erotic adversary in the cultivated, soft- spoken general. Even as she learns that Valdez himself has ordered the massacre of Aguas Oscuras, Guerrera can't stop herself from engaging in a final, sadomasochistic coupling with him, a mistake that will cost her everything—her job, her reputation, very nearly her life. A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country- -and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine.