cover image Blood Relative

Blood Relative

Carolyn Hougan. Fawcett Books, $20 (311pp) ISBN 978-0-449-90646-0

Insane with grief over the murders of his wife and daughter--victims of Argentina's ``dirty war''--Rolando Carrera goes to Alexandria, Va., to torture and kill an American teenager in this artfully crafted mystery. Hougan ( Shooting in the Dark ) chronicles the moral decay of Carera, who blames the girl--his niece, now known as Mariah Ebinger--for the deaths of his loved ones, and who, with a hired assassin, slaughters those who stand between him and his intended victim. Mariah, unaware of the danger stalking her, is plagued with unexplained fears and memory lapses. She screams in terror at the sight of a helicopter flying over her house and cannot account for her fluency in Spanish, a language she has never heard. While inadvertently helping Carrera ensnare her, Mariah unleashes death and destruction on an entire community. Carrera, however, needs--even more than Mariah's death--to suppress the facts about his own part in the brutal slaying of his family. Hougan's sharp prose imparts urgency to her sensitively rendered account of all-too-plausible violence and its chilling consequences. (Apr.)