Shadows Across America

A man’s search for a missing girl leads him across borders and through a landscape of urban violence in this timely, propulsive, and brilliantly imagined thriller.

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.

Guillermo Valcárcel was born in Madrid. He worked in the construction industry by day and studied filmmaking at night until 2008, when he moved to Costa Rica, where he currently lives and works as a filmmaker. He also dedicates his time to writing and illustrating. He is the author of another thriller, Counterfeit, as well as The Wave That Hit Spain, an influential essay that launched his writing career.

Kit Maude is a Spanish-to-English translator and editor based in Buenos Aires. His translations of stories by Latin American authors have been featured in Granta, the Literary Review, and The Short Story Project, among other publications. He has translated several great Argentinian and Uruguayan writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Armonía Somers, Julio Cortázar, Antonio Di Benedetto, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. He was born in Hong Kong and received a bachelor’s degree in comparative American studies from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.