Norma Gomez

2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award quarter-Finalist : Mystery & Thrillers

Our story begins with Shawn Delgado, an All-Star American High School football player born in El Paso, Texas. His parents were undocumented Mexicans who lived in the shadows. Shawn didn't. His youth was spent crisscrossing the Texas/Mexico border to visit family and friends. When he turned eighteen, graduating in the top ten percent of his Texas high school class, and to the everlasting consternation of his parents, he decided to move to Mexico.

He had chosen to join the military and to live his a life as a Mexican Marine over an American college education, student loan debt, and a struggle to make it in a country that still considered him a wetback; a taco-eater from south of the border. Now married with one son and another on the way Petty Officer Second Class Shawn Delgado’s world is turned upside down when he is sent on a mission into the Lacandon jungle in northern Guatemala.

When the members of the Lacandon mission team start turning up dead, Lt. Daniel Torres, a Mexican Naval Criminal Investigator is assigned to look into the murders. Everything he is able to uncover point him in just one direction, to the Office of Cooperative Intelligence, an alphabet soup of American intelligence agencies working in Mexico City. But when the OCI starts to stonewall his investigation he decides to take it in a different direction and soon joins up with Ruby Cortez, the Director of Mexican Consulate Security in Dallas, Texas.

Daniel and Ruby quickly realize they’ve stumbled onto something more dangerous than they ever could have imagined. And as their hunt for the truth to what happened to Shawn Delgado and the other Marines who went into the Lacandon jungle intensifies as they are thrown into a life and death struggle with one of the United States most powerful agencies, the Defense Clandestine Service.

A masterful thriller that blends international politics with twisting plots and suspense. A must read.