The Dirty War

Argentina's military regime of the late '70s provides the chilling backdrop to this novel about the Dirty War, in which thousands of people deemed ``threats'' to the government were covertly tortured and killed. Atre (from atreverse, to dare) and his friend Chino constantly scheme to make money, just as Atre's father, owner of a small cruise boat company, does on a larger scale. And like Atre's father, the boys' business activities in La Boca, a scruffy but hard-working area of Buenos Aires, bring sudden trouble. Slaughter traces the family's terror when Atre's father becomes one of the ``disappeared.'' He returns to them, alive, after they heed a message to sell their new house to a certain colonel who covets it. Chino is not so lucky when, implicated in a petty fraud to evade a book tax, he joins the ranks of the disappeared. Atre never knows for sure, but has good reason to believe that Chino is brutally murdered. Conversations and newspaper items suggest the extent of the Dirty War, and some of the opposition to it; Atre's grandmother is one of the celebrated and courageous Mothers of the Plaza. The storytelling may lack complexity, but the subject matter is gripping. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)