Book excerpt: Searching for the Jaguar. This romantic thriller is set against the background of the lush Amazonian jungle and the violent streets of a North American city. A young American couple seek adventure and fulfillment in Brazils exotic mixture of peoples and religions. The characters are protagonists in a mural of interrelated events that cross social, economic, and national boundaries. The reality within which the events occur overwhelms the individual characters and takes away their ability to comprehend their destinies. Five lives intertwine in a game of life and death: Hank, the idealist caught in a web of intrigue, power and cocaine trafficking; Deb, the dedicated nurse who discovers real love in a foreboding setting; Steve, the serious lawyer struggling with his emotional conflict between duty and passion; Darryl, the ex-con misfit prone to explode in a blasphemous rage of jealousy and resentment; Scott, the young invalid who suddenly comes of age when murder and violence shatters the security of his life. Each one of them, driven by inner passions, brings mystery and depth to a story that connects the reader to a world of rich lyrical and philosophical implications. The story-related by Scott-sets out to reconstruct the lives of the protagonists with whatever information he can collect from diaries, letters, interviews, personal observation, and even his own imagination. He senses only dimly the multiple forces at play which are presented with an underlying surrealistic humor that gives the narrative shape and depth. He fits together the many puzzling pieces-which he can neither explain nor justify-and in the process begins to set his own life in order. Like the phoenix that rises from its ashes, Scott transcends his suffering and creates a new dimension of living as he recreates the old. A surreal humor underlies this compelling story about love, transformation, death, and survival. Superbly crafted, lyrically written. LETTER TO THE READER OF SEARCHING FOR THE JAGUAR BY CARLOTA LINDSAY You may have noticed that part of my dedication is addressed to you, the reader, and to your imagination and sense of humor. This is because a novel is fiction and becomes real only through the active participation of your creative self. It is in this way that you are as much the author of Searching for the Jaguar as I am. This is where a novel differs from a movie. In the latter the viewer receives lots of information visually without much participatory effort. In the modern novel the reader has to reconstitute the whole from information about its parts. This activity is closer to the one we perform in real life in order to understand ourselves and what our true role is. I want to mention also that a novel takes place in a time and space that for a few hours becomes your own and where the characters reveal themselves and unveil their unique function in the dimension of the novel that you help create. How much you learn about them or understand them is up to you. What about the characters? They are not presented but rather present themselves by what they say, what they do, and how they regard, and are regarded by, each other; that is, they are discovered existentially. The reader learns about them gradually: much as it is in real life the original perception is constantly evolving. By observing the characters actions and hearing their words, the reader ends up with more insight into their situation than the characters themselves do. The characters are searching not only within the dimension of the novel but beyond it in the imagination of the reader. In a sense, they escape the novel and walk into the readers consciousness, where they help him probe his own self. They have already escaped into mine, where they are searching for a continuity I did not know was there. In that sense they are searching, like Pirandellos characters, for an author. From the beginning the