Liberation of Little Heaven-C

Psychological dilemmas play out over the wide and scarred terrain of South American politics in Jacob's (Stone Cowboy) macho collection of 13 stories. In ""Solidarity in Green,"" Mallory, a former Peace Corps volunteer, takes his new wife, Rebecca, to visit Honduras, where they find themselves negotiating with a radical revolutionary group who have kidnapped Rebecca's 15-year-old son. Among ample references to the big screen (""She kissed him like Hollywood"" is the most embarrassing), Mallory secures the boy's safety and narrowly escapes forfeiting his own. The more delicate architecture of ""How Birds Communicate"" elevates it above cops-and-robbers ballyhoo. That story's narrator struggles to understand his sympathy for Pastor Coronel, the supporter of Paraguayan dictator General Stroessner who killed the narrator's father and caused his mother's mental breakdown. The title story details the saga of a woman consigned to prostitution and then barbarically disfigured by her keeper. Some of these tales are keepers, but too many take the easy way out, indulging in melodrama; moreover, Jacobs too often slips into self-conscious and unconvincing language. (Jan.) FYI: Jacobs, a career Foreign Service officer with experience in Turkey, Bolivia, Paraguay and Honduras, served as Cultural Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid.