Marco Buitrago is a free-lance journalist who survives by writing scientific articles, until his feature on the international human genome project brings Marie Alida Karwecki into his life, and the old lady changes his whole existence. She hires him to leave Chile and follow the trail of Sofia Bethelnahu, missing for decades, and his journey takes him from New York to Germany, from Santiago to Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize. Amongst the upheaval throughout the subcontinent, his search cannot avoid the crossfire between guerrillas in Central America, paramilitaries and the secret intervention from the United States. This political police thriller is full of black humour that pulls on language from graphic novels and film to construct a tale that laughs at the serious and the sceptical, the cynical and the terrified.