HAVANA TWIST

When only 14 of the 15 right-minded, blue-haired brigadistas of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) return from Fidel Castro’s workers’ paradise to California, and when the missing do-gooder is her own mother June, attorney Willa Jansson (Star Witness, 1997, etc.) swings into action. Within 48 hours she’s asking questions on the streets of Havana, and within six months. . . . Well, that long span of time—during which Willa, thrown out of Cuba, rings key doorbells in Mexico City and also back home in Santa Cruz, tracing June’s links to the CIA, to an imprisoned drug smuggler, and to half a dozen suspicious characters whose identities seem to change with the tide—that long span indicates the odd combination of urgency and weightlessness that over and over and over marks the proceedings as (in Willa’s terms) “My worst nightmare had come true.” As well-meaning as the WILPF, but this time not much more effective.