BODY OF TRUTH

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SYNOPSIS

“…a surreal and violent netherworld where fear rules…”

Stuart Haydon, the popular and psychologically complex homicide detective returns in his fifth novel, a story of moral convolution in which he investigates the disappearance of a young American woman in the murky underworld of Guatemala.

When Lena Muller, daughter of a wealthy Houston businessman, disappears in Central America, her father, convinced she has been murdered, hires private detective Jim Fossler to investigate. Six months later Haydon receives an urgent call from Fossler — an old friend — from Guatemala City. Fossler has found Lena, but believes she is in serious trouble; sounding quite shaken, he asks Haydon to fly down to help him clear up the situation.

As soon as Haydon arrives in Guatemala City he is immediately drawn into the country’s surreal and violent netherworld where fear rules and, where a small group of American expatriates are engaged in quasi-official intrigues that have entangled them with corrupt military officials and an elusive faction of Guatemalan guerrillas.

The unforgettable cast of Lena’s “friends,” all desperately trying to locate her for many various reasons, include Bennett Pittner, the brilliant, jaded semi-alcoholic CIA head of station in Guatemala; Janet Pittner, his wealthy and dangerously impetuous ex-wife, a woman for whom deceit is second nature — and a pleasure, Dr. Aris Grajeda, a young Guatemalan doctor who passionately fights both his country’s suffering and the corruption that causes it, and Taylor Cage, a shadowy “freelancer” in the intelligence trade, an undeniably arrogant, calculating, and charming man, as “possessing of true bravery as any man Haydon had ever met.”

As Haydon is drawn further into this maze of conspiracies, he begins to realize that Lena Muller is not the young woman either he or her parents thought her to be. And, much to his regret, he also learns that it is not only people who disappear in Guatemala — often the border between reality and illusion vanishes as well.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTS

“…the eerie world of los desaparecidos–the disappeared ones–is almost unimaginable.”

For years I was active in a human rights organization that concentrated on monitoring the political assassinations that plagued the Central American country of Guatemala. My travels in Guatemala to research this novel based on the political violence in that country turned out to be an experience that was as surreal as any that I am ever likely to have again. For several weeks I daily visited the city’s several morgues to keep a personal tab on the bodies brought into the morgues during the previous night. Guatemala’s Indians were most of the victims, but I also saw European kids who were traveling the country alone or in small groups who also got caught up in the country’s violence.

The eerie world of los desaparecidos–the disappeared ones–is almost unimaginable. The elusiveness of “truth” is a theme that I imagine is as old as man’s desire to tell stories. I think most of us have to live a good number of years before we really begin to grasp the huge complexities behind such a small word. This is a story about those complexities in the life of a few people in a dark and beautiful country that has a dark and beautiful soul.

Body of Truth was the fifth and last novel to feature Stuart Haydon. It was published in 1992, and won Germany’s Bochumer Krimi Archiv award for the best suspense novel of the year.