REMEMBER MY FACE

Miami private eye Willie Cuesta is sent to central Florida to track down a missing person. Maybe persons.

Three months ago, Ernesto Pérez, who’d sneaked into Florida to pick produce after the workers at his coffee farm defected for better-paying American jobs, suddenly stopped sending remittances to his family back in Mexico. Now his son, Pedro Pérez, has disappeared while looking for him. So starchy immigration lawyer Abbie LeGrange wants Willie to nose around in Cane County till he finds at least one of them. Capt. Rory Camp, of the Cane County Sheriff’s Office, and Homer Eccles, the recently widowed farmer for whom Ernesto worked, don’t exactly welcome Willie with open arms, but they don’t shut him down either. Soon he’s chatting with people as different as coyote Narciso Cruz, who supplies Eccles with laborers; Loretta Turk, the Eccles crew leader to whom Ernesto complained about a foreman who cheated him; and E.J. Eccles, the farmer’s beautiful daughter, who wants Willie to teach her, um, the salsa. The deeper he digs, the more clearly Willie sees that the county is being torn asunder by two equally dangerous groups: the heroin crew, represented by party girl Dusty Powell and dealer Marcus Morrell, and the Sovereign Rights Movement personified by powerful BioMaster owner Quincy Vetter, who refuses to sell the feds a worthless scrap of land because he takes every government intrusion into his county as a personal affront.

Beneath the so-so mystery is a heartfelt account of the risks Latinos face in modern America whether or not they're undocumented.