Never Breathe Easy

Never Breathe Easy is a political family thriller about Argentina’s Dirty War, exile, journalism, guilt, stolen children, false identities and the way historical violence keeps echoing through generations. It moves between Buenos Aires in the 1970s, Mexico and New York in exile, Rome in the 1980s and 1990s, and an Umbrian farmhouse where the buried truth finally erupts.

The novel opens in Rome in March 1996. An older Argentine man living under the name Andrés Campos takes his usual Sunday walk to the Janiculum. He has built a late-life peace with his wife, Mariel Kirschmann, a famous journalist and survivor of the Argentine dictatorship’s prisons. But on the twentieth anniversary of the 1976 coup, a young woman approaches him at the overlook and speaks in Argentine Spanish. She asks if he knows what the building below is; he says it used to be a convent and is now Regina Coeli prison. She replies that this is the perfect place for them to meet. Then she tells him: “We have come for you.” With the help of a large young man in a Lakers shirt, she drugs him and drives him out of Rome.

The kidnapped man is not really Andrés Campos. He is Vinicio Flores, a former Argentine naval officer who disappeared during the dictatorship. His kidnappers are Lea Bernstein, once a radical young woman from Buenos Aires and now a human-rights investigator, and Claudio Formentin, a furious teenage boy raised by a notorious torturer, Ignacio Etcheverry. Claudio believes he is one of the children stolen from imprisoned women during the Dirty War. Lea has evidence that his biological mother is Mariel Kirschmann. They have abducted Andrés/Vinicio because they think he knows the truth of Claudio’s birth and of Mariel’s imprisonment.