Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A man’s search for a missing girl leads him across borders and through a landscape of urban violence
Shadows Across America
What you need to know before your trail
Ethan is living a solid, rational life as a bail bondsman in Florida when he’s compelled to make a seemingly irrational decision: abandon his job and his girlfriend and head south to rescue the daughter of his ex-lover, Michelle. She appears to have been kidnapped by the Mara—vicious street gangs ripping apart the fabric of Central American life—and there’s every reason to believe the girl is dead already. Except for the one that Ethan has been hiding from everyone: she is calling to him in his dreams with three desperate words…I’m still alive.
What begins as an urgent mission to save her soon pulls Ethan into a subterranean culture of fear, corruption, and human trafficking with a surreal connection to the most unspeakable crimes of the twentieth century. Suddenly Ethan’s past has come back to haunt him—especially his relationship with Michelle and a passion that was as dangerous as it was intoxicating. Now, heeding impossible cries for help from a lost child, Ethan embarks on a journey that devolves from dreamscape to a nightmare from which there may be no return.
Travel Guide
Travel BookTrail style across Central America
“Since the nineties, the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America which was made up of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras had been dominated by Mafia like gangs known as the Mara; their violence reached levels unheard of in other criminal groups. Their members, which numbered in the hundreds of thousands, recruited destitute teenagers and street children. Rites of initiation could be performed by children as young as ten, sometimes even younger. Their life expectancy was similarly short: few of them lived past the age of thirty.”
“Their lives were summed up in a common tattoo: three points of a triangle representing “ My Crazy Life”, the fate that awaited every member of the Mara: prison, death or the hospital. The very term was associated with the marabunta, huge swarms of predatory ants that invaded and devoured everything in their path.”
“Central America had become the most violent region in the world without a war ever being officially declared.”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Shadows Across America
Destination: Central America, Brazil Author/guide: Guillermo Valcárcel Departure Time: 2000s
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