Blood Relative - Hardcover

Despite a highfalutin Author's Note describing it as ``a book about `real' and received memory, about our inability to escape the past, about deception and discovery,'' this is really a two-act melodrama about a crazed victim of Argentine political terrorism who, after losing his entire family except for his three-year-old niece--years ago spirited off to America--decides (don't ask why) to avenge himself by finding and killing the niece. Act One, about how Rolando Carerra, with the help of his volatile henchman Hugo Moro, tracks down and prepares to kill Maria--now teenaged Mariah Ebinger, living with a hypernormal adoptive family in Wisconsin, then the D.C. suburbs--is a throwaway; you could read the blurb and crack the book halfway through without missing a thing except for Mariah's deflowering by clean-cut Ryan Ferguson. Act Two, about how Mariah and Ryan frantically scheme to stay one jump ahead of Uncle Rolando and his sidekick, is an expertly sustained chase, as Hougan (Shooting in the Dark, 1984; The Romeo Flag, 1989) brings the pursuers to Alexandria just as Mariah's coincidentally realized that she's adopted and taken off from home--knowing, after she calls her parents, that something terrible is going on between them and the strange man she's glimpsed, but not knowing enough to sell a convincing story to the police. If you forget the memory/political pretensions and overlook the delaying tactics of the exposition, well, this isn't half bad. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Insane with grief over the murders of his wife and daughter--victims of Argentina's "dirty war"--Rolando Carrera goes to Alexandria, Va., to torture and kill an American teenager in this artfully crafted mystery. Hougan ( Shooting in the Dark ) chronicles the moral decay of Carera, who blames the girl--his niece, now known as Mariah Ebinger--for the deaths of his loved ones, and who, with a hired assassin, slaughters those who stand between him and his intended victim. Mariah, unaware of the danger stalking her, is plagued with unexplained fears and memory lapses. She screams in terror at the sight of a helicopter flying over her house and cannot account for her fluency in Spanish, a language she has never heard. While inadvertently helping Carrera ensnare her, Mariah unleashes death and destruction on an entire community. Carrera, however, needs--even more than Mariah's death--to suppress the facts about his own part in the brutal slaying of his family. Hougan's sharp prose imparts urgency to her sensitively rendered account of all-too-plausible violence and its chilling consequences.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.