Chicano attorney Luis Montez has had a bad year and is relaxing on a Mexican beach with a beer in hand when Rachel Espinoza introduces herself and spreads her blanket—and very attractive bikini-clad body—next to him. They’re both staying at friends’ nearby houses and have heard of each other. He looks for her in the following days but doesn’t see her again. Back in Denver, Montez is approached by a private detective, Conrad “Rad” Valdez, who’s working a missing-persons case. Apparently, the lawyer was one of the last to see Rachel. The two Mexican Americans from different generations begin to share information, and Montez learns Rachel was adopted by the very wealthy Vargas family after her birth mother died in labor. Oddly, she believed that Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, a radical Chicano writer and activist, was her real father. She had made plans to meet him, even though he disappeared in 1974! As Montez works his own cases while continuing to unravel more about the missing woman, he learns that the young detective had a relationship with her. Could Rad have had something to do with her disappearance? And was the firebomb thrown into Denver’s community bookshop—that killed a writer friend—connected to the case? Nothing is as it seems, including the Vargas family secrets that soon threaten Luis Montez and his own father! The fourth installment in Ramos’ Luis Montez Mystery series of five novels follows the compelling search for Rachel Espinoza while introducing readers to another chapter in the Chicano civil rights movement.
