Blood Daughters: A Romilia Chacon Novel: A Romilia Chacon Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

A child dies on the border between California and Mexico. This is nothing new: immigrants die crossing the border all the time, escaping from poverty and violence in Latin America. They bake in the desert. But this death is different. Someone has taken body parts from the child.

FBI Agent Romilia Chacon, a Salvadoran American, follows this case into a world that swallows her with its horror, a world that exists alongside ours, where children are bought and sold like cattle and shipped to men all across the country. The dealers in this blackest of markets have no moral barometer, only a lust for cash. And one among them has taken murder to a level beyond serial killing.

Romilia comes to this case already broken: the man she loved and yet had to hunt--drug runner Tekun Uman, a regular on the FBI's Most Wanted List--is gone. Romilia has two friends, her partner Nancy Pearl--who lives a double life between the Feds and the cartels--and a bottle of booze. Romilia's mother is on her back to get sober; her son drifts further and further away. And the killer is taking away pieces of Romilia's life, day by day.

Reviews

Praise for the Romilia Chacn novels:

"Sexy, fast paced and satisfyingly violent... The simmering tension between Romilia and her criminal admirer will leave readers eagerly anticipating the fourth book in this gritty procedural series."
--Publisher's Weekly

"A neat, Hitchcockian thriller... let's hope there are real FBI agents as brilliant as Romilia Chacn."
--Washington Post

"Romilia Chacn is smart, sexy (and how do you say 'feisty' in Spanish)... Marcos Villatoro catches her voice and attitude so perfectly that we hope to read many more books about Chacn."
--Chicago Tribune

"An extended, action-filled and entertaining battle of wits on both sides of--and under--the border."
--Library Journal

"Villatoro's lyrical writing style provides the perfect vehicle for describing his fascinatingly flawed Salvadoran protagonist...this is a compelling, character-driven novel in which Villatoro generates tremendous sympathy for his complex and very human heroine."
--Booklist

"Charles Dickens, or more recently, Joyce Carol Oates and Margaret Atwood, have used the crime novel to eloquently express themselves... Add to the chorus the name of Marcos M. Villatoro... Villatoro has immersed himself in the police procedural form and has delivered a story that is enlivened by an enigmatic protagonist one hopes to see again... one of the best novels--mystery or otherwise--you'll read this year."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Author Bio

Marcos M. Villatoro is the author of nine books. He has won numerous prizes, including two Emmy Awards for his PBS Television essays. His first Romilia Chacn thriller was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001.

Villatoro was born in San Francisco and raised in Tennessee. He has spent much of his life in Central America (in his other country, El Salvador). Villatoro is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and now holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Writing at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles, where he lives.

The Romilia Chacn books have been published in five languages: English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Japanese.