SIN QUERER

The world seems to have passed the remote village of San Lorenzo by. And that's just fine for some inhabitants, like the autocratic Bazan family, who scan a newcomer through binoculars. He's Mario Rojas, an engineer dispatched to plan a bridge through rugged territory, for the one-shot overland transport of a tourist boat, of all things. But to many in the stultifying former mining town, Rojas means relief, reconstruction, a renewed prosperity. One by one they approach Rojas (whose main outside interest is bedding the local women) with petitions, bribes and pleadings. It's an Indian named Rosa whose vigils draw the engineer's attention. She's searching for her father, vanished a week now – and who was embroiled with the powerful Bazans in a land dispute. Long-distance lenses remain locked on Rojas as he sences the stench of corruption and murder that emanates from the mayor's office ot the church to the disused mines to the Bazan hacienda. While SIN QUERER follows the lines of a traditional thriller, it develops into something much less predictable, a multi-tiered study of evil under wide Patagonian skies, that reaches a jarring climax during a solar eclipse.