The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

by Bob Shacochis

Renowned through four award-winning books for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul before sweeping across time and continents to unravel tangled knots of romance, espionage, and vengeance. In riveting prose, Shacochis builds a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world.

When humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful and seductive photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape riddled with poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It's the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed, and to make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both Jackie and Eville Burnette, a member of Special Forces who has been assigned to protect her.

From the violent, bandit-dominated terrain of World War II Dubrovnik to the exquisitely rendered Istanbul in the 1980s, Shacochis brandishes Jackie's shadowy family history with daring agility. Caught between her first love and the unsavory attentions of her father--an elite spy and quintessential Cold War warrior pressuring his daughter to follow in his footsteps--seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan that puts her on course to becoming the soulless woman Tom equally feared and desired.

Set over fifty years and in four countries backdropped by different wars, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a magnum opus that brings to life, through the mystique and allure of history, an intricate portrait of catastrophic events that led up to the war on terror and the America we are today.

• ISBN10: 0802119824
• ISBN13: 9780802119827
• Publish Date: 3 September 2013
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 23 August 2024
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 640
• Language: English

Reviews

[jnkay01]

My AP review: http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/shacochis-back-woman-lost-soul-20214135

It's hard to talk about "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" without giving away too much of its intrigue. The novel starts off in U.S.-occupied Haiti, but it's not really just about Haiti. It's about the toll paid by individuals when humanitarian interventions peter out or fail, and that makes the novel's drama all the more heartbreaking and riveting.

The title of Bob Shacochis' first book in 10 years initially refers to a woman calling herself a photojournalist, making contacts in Haiti in the mid-1990s when the U.S. military occupied the Caribbean country. It's a turbulent time period that Shacochis knows well — he wrote about his experiences embedded with U.S. Special Forces in Haiti in 1994 in the nonfiction work "The Immaculate Invasion."

Then Shacochis expands the story over five decades and three continents. He manages to cover the Cold War, the Balkans, the rise of Islamist extremism and Haiti's seemingly endless humanitarian crisis while exploring the photojournalist's disturbing family history.

It's a sweeping, expansive book grounded by details such as epic potholes in Haiti's roads and crowded ferry decks in Turkey. Without veering into conspiracy theories or melodrama, Shacochis builds for both his readers and his characters a sense that something important is being overlooked amid competing agendas.

"The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" is an elegant reminder that connections are made one by one — but not everyone is playing the same game.