Customer Reviews

Against the Current

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At a Left Coast fundraiser for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front the speaker - a guerrilla commandante implicated in the massacre of US Embassy personnel in El Salvador - turns up dead. Francisco Lefevre, an Air Force Security Police officer, is caught bending over the body. Can he find the murderer before the guerrillas' sponsors - ranging from leftover Weathermen to the leading leftists of Congress - get him? The novel is set during Desert Shield, with the prospect of imminent war in the Gulf a dark presence throughout the story. To complicate matters Franco had encountered the commandante before, on a secret mission to parachute into Sandinista Nicaragua and recover the remains of his uncle, a Cuban-American flyer whose B-26 had crashed in the mountains on return from the Bay of Pigs. The action moves through other unusual locales; the Ahwanee Hotel set in the scenic splendor of Yosemite; Natchez, Mississippi, an Old Southern city founded by the French before New Orleans; and Omaha, Nebraska, in the heart of the Heartland. The plot is a whodunit with a military flavor but the theme deals with the moral and legal ambiguities of fighting the Cold War through surrogate conflicts in places like Central America, and right here on Main Street USA in the shadowy, bitter struggle for the hearts and minds of the American people. At its heart AGAINST THE CURRENT is about revenge and forgiveness, self discovery and self delusion, and the shadings between acts of war, peace, betrayal, and murder.