Toward the Light by Bonnar Spring
There’s nothing quite like discovering a new, exotic city through the pages of a thriller. Through fast-paced fiction, the sights and sounds and smells of a place come through in technicolor. A city feels so much more, well, thrilling. It beats any guidebook.
Bonnar Spring’s beautifully executed first novel Toward the Light (Oceanview) brings us to Guatemala City – Guate to those who know the place – where the first thing to notice is the light. Or, in Spanish, la luz. There’s nothing subtle about her protagonist’s name: Luz Concepcion. She’s the haunted daughter of this war-torn land who returns with a last chance at vengeance. Martin Benavides, the man who killed her father, has risen high – from “a solider of the revolution” to the country’s president to, now, a supremely powerful drug trafficker living in opulent isolation with his family in “a compound that extended an entire city block.”
The layers that Luz must penetrate to reach her prey are many, both literal and metaphorical. Part of the joy in reading this story is discovering the layers of Guatemala City, a place that seems to open itself upon closer inspection. At first sight: “the city coiled, thick and dirty, like the forward line of an advancing army.” But once you’re immersed, those sights and smells transport you. It’s why artists, like Luz’s mission contact, Evan McManus, tend to stay awhile. There are certain places in Latin America that captures the quality of light like nowhere else on earth. Guate is apparently one of them.
This is also a region of the world that has faced endless upheaval, from guerilla rebels and corrupt regimes, to its position as a key corridor in cocaine trafficking – getting the product from Peru and Columbia to the end-users in North America. If only it were as simple as good versus evil. Here in Guatemala City, you never quite know whom to trust. Saints and sinners shift by circumstance.
What starts as a straight-forward tale of revenge soon becomes something much more slippery. It will spoil nothing to report that the only character to be trusted in these three-hundred-plus pages is Luz herself. And even her memories aren’t quite what they seem.
Her CIA friend, Richard, once helped Luz and her mother escape the country and resettle in New Hampshire after the murder of her father. Now he’s helped to embed Luz as a nanny for the grandson of her prey, Martin Benavides. The old man and his wife are mostly housebound at the compound these days, leaving the family business to be run by his son, Bobby, who has an unsavory history with past nannies.
The plan seems simple enough. Penetrate the layers of the Benavides family until she can get close to the patriarch. Then, blow him up with a CIA-supplied bomb. With seemingly nothing left to lose, Luz signs on for a mission that will not only achieve vengeance for her father but will eliminate a malignant presence in the land of her birth.
Yet, the closer she gets to her murderous goal, the more doubt and love and twisted allegiances cloud her vision. With Toward the Light, Bonnar Spring has delivered my favorite kind of thriller: one full of moral ambiguity and evil at its most compromised.
Toward the Light is now available for purchase.
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