A skilled journalist and the author of National Book Award-winning fiction (Easy in the Islands), Shacochis thinks big, and his new novel (his first in two decades) is truly magisterial. It opens with humanitarian lawyer Tom Harrington investigating the death of Jackie Scott, a feisty photojournalist who once whipped him around in Haiti. But Harrington turns out to be a relatively minor player in large-scale story dating back to the end of World War II, as the beheading of young Stjepan Kovacevic's Iron Cross father signals coming changes in the Balkans and the world at large. Thus are sown the seeds of Stjepan's hatred for all things communist, Muslim, and, finally, not gloriously righteous Christian West. Flash forward, and Stjepan is U.S. diplomat Steve Chambers, training the teenage daughter he covets to shift personas in the act of serving her country. Eventually, she's the woman who loses her soul, as "America...at war behind the drapery of shadows and secrets" has lost its soul. Throughout, we see how policy is shaped by both the historical and the blindingly personal. VERDICT Densely detailed yet immensely readable, this eye-opener (which could have been titled "Why We Are in the Middle East") is essential reading. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/13.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

National Book Award--winning novelist Shacochis (The Immaculate Invasion, 1999, etc.) makes a long-awaited--indeed, much-anticipated--return to fiction with this stunning novel of love, innocence and honor lost. The wait was worth it, for Shacochis has delivered a work that in its discomfiting moral complexity and philosophical density belongs alongside Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene. Tom Harrington is a humanitarian lawyer whose path takes him into difficult country: Haiti in the wake of dictatorship and storm, for one. He is unsettled and lonely, even as his stateside wife is one of those blessedly ignorant Americans who "pray for the deafness that comes with a comfortable life"--a comfortable life that would be much more attainable were Tom someone who cared about money. He is not saintly, though. Into his orbit has come a fetching, utterly mysterious journalist whom Tom has met more than once along the trail of good deeds done by sometimes not so good people. Her murder sends him reeling into a long, arcing story of discovery that becomes ever more tangled as Shacochis spins it, taking it across decades and oceans. Among the players are a tough-as-nails Delta Force combatant who surely knows that he's being played as a pawn by the likes of an unlikable senior spook who lives for opera, cocktails and deception; even so, the soldier takes pride in his role in what he calls "Jihadi pest control," just as the spy takes pride in what he did in all those dark corners during the Cold War. These characters are bound to one another, and to Jackie, by blood or elective affinities. Either way, Shacochis would seem to suggest, their real business is to hide themselves from the world, while the business of the world is to help them disguise their subterfuge. Everything in the landscape is secret and forbidden, potentially fatal, doomed to fail--and yet everyone persists, presses on, with what they believe their missions to be. Shacochis is a master of characterization; his story, though very long, moves like a fast-flowing river, and it is memorably, smartly written: " Cleopatra spoke nine languages,' Jackie informed him with a distinctly peevish rise to her voice for what she obviously considered a set series of infinitely tiresome challenges to the perception of her specialness, the unfair excesses of her drop-dead good looks or intellect or courage or God knows, her very birth, as if she had somehow stolen those laudable parts of herself from someone else, an imaginary deprived person." An often depressing, cautionary and thoroughly excellent tale of the excesses of empire, ambition and the too easily fragmented human soul.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

LIKE MOST SERIOUS American novels about war, "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" wants to explain the country in its entirety. Of course, that's a tall order, but Bob Shacochis doesn't lack for ambition - his novel is about not one but two contemporary wars, both of them endless: the war on terror and the war on drugs. It's a novel about the United States that takes place largely outside the United States, if you discount the many scenes set on various world-renowned American golf courses. Although the book strives to paint a full portrait of its panoply of complicated characters - both in warrior mode and on the home front - the problem with endless war in a narrative is that the writer ends up not with "War and Peace" but with war and ... more war. One follows from battle to battle, from firefight to firefight, from political assassination to terror attack to revenge-taking, without resolution, because the endless war can conceive of no resolution: resolution, which makes a narrative complete, is not part of this story. "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul" opens in the chaotic, corrupt landscape of Haiti in the 1990s, an unpredictable place more or less run (as it still is, in part) by U.N. peacekeepers. This is a country Shacochis knows well; he covered America's 1994 intervention and occupation and wrote about it in his intelligent nonfiction book "The Immaculate Invasion," which showed real sensitivity and sympathy to soldiers, as well as an understanding of how Haiti works and doesn't work. Those qualities serve him again in "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul." As usual in Western novels set there, Haiti provides Shacochis with a torrid, primitive, dangerous backdrop for the shenanigans of white people. Many arrangements in the book are made on the terrace of the Hotel Oloffson, Port-au-Prince's infamous ramshackle expat enclave. Love affairs begin in upscale restaurants. Other things happen (including sex between outsiders) at nighttime Vodou ceremonies. The human-rights lawyer Tom Harrington seems to be the book's hero during the first section. At a swank restaurant uptown, hanging out with an American movie director who wants to interview the rebels to the north, Harrington meets the woman of the title, who could be the identical twin of the "pixie-ish Hollywood actress who starred in romantic comedies ... one of Harrington's favorites, the standard-bearer for every Sally-nextdoor heartthrob fantasy the studios could confect." This glamorous, soulless beauty turns out to be Jackie Scott. Jackie is "a remote angel" with "golden" hair and blue eyes, in her mid-20s, and ostensibly a photographer with a degree in ethnobotany. As the novel progresses, the golden-haired Jackie, under one of her many aliases, is often naked or topless, wears boyfriend boxers that sit low on her slender hips, and looks great even when wounded, even when vomiting or drunk, even when in withdrawal from drugs. It turns out she's not just an ethnobotanist. She is also the daughter of the man who, for all intents and purposes, runs the world. This woman who lost her soul is a male fantasy, an object of male regard, and, unlike the novel's big male characters, she is seen from within only while she's a teenager and on a few other discrete occasions. You'd imagine the novel could not help foundering on the shoals of this gilded, pornographic creature - yet the world Shacochis presents is believable enough and important enough to allow the book to sail on over the annoyance of the fantastical siren at its heart. I cannot reveal the strange contortions Jackie goes through or the levels of being and nothingness she experiences without spoiling some of the book's many denouements. But suffice it to say that as you become more enmeshed in this paranoid and persuasive presentation of the world we live in, Jackie (or Dottie, or Renee) becomes slowly more human, less a goddess, in spite of her almost mythic travails. In fact it's a man's world Shacochis delineates, and it's probably fair that he turns his heroine into a man's fantasy of what constitutes female power. The world the book creates is one of secret Delta Force missions, of Pakistani peacekeeper/drug dealers, of mesmerizing Vodou priests, of Croatian revenge seekers, of spies and "gooks" and "wogs" (Shacochis's characters' vocabulary), and - at its heart, often at Jackie's side - Eville Burnette, a handsome, straight-shooting American soldier with perfect pecs and glutes who comes out of the West from a horse-wrangling mom and hunter dad, a fighter who is willing to do what he's assigned even if it doesn't square with the America he has for so long felt in his veins, especially when he polishes his dad's old guns or when he fishes or when he ventures into what's left of our pristine wilderness. Half the time, Shacochis seems indebted to "The Bourne Identity" (both the Ludlum novel and the movie), and the other half to some combination of le Carré and Hemingway; the sharks eat Burnette's catch, let's just say. Tom Harrington, trying to document human rights abuses in Haiti, and accompanied by Jackie and her camera, gets caught up in a dangerous situation. An unsolved murder provides some of the propulsive force for the global story that unfolds in the many pages that follow. Characters in the novel have a kind of Napoleonic world vision, an obsessively imperial point of view that spans the globe, stirring, disturbing, exhilarating. Shacochis travels in space and time, taking us not just to Haiti but to Istanbul and Jackie's childhood in the 1980s, as well as to Croatia in the 1940s and Sarajevo in the 1990s - and to America and finally back to Haiti. All kinds of weaponry and body armor are enlisted to tell the tale, many kinds of vehicles are driven, lots of satphones and pagers and cellphones and other communications devices are used. Men love hardware. In this book, we travel the world in choppers and planes and boats. We learn about "humint" and "tradecraft." Golf and its metaphors are central to the ruling American cabal in the novel, which controls Eville Burnette. Rosaries and prayer are often mentioned. A Croatian dog and Vodou zombie powders (never far from any white man's thoughts concerning Haiti) create some lunatic twists. Not far from the book's much-anticipated end, we follow Jackie and Eville on a weeklong fishing tryst in the surf-battered wilds of a rugged, stormy American cape. All of this, except for the final romance, has been in pursuit of victory in what Jackie's brilliant, depraved father, Steven Chambers, sees as the clash of civilizations - swallowing the Samuel Huntington formula - a holy battle between a glittering Christian West and the dark network of Muslim terrorists who would impose a global caliphate. A childhood victim of Muslim violence in the Balkans, and now a golf-loving, Mass-attending, top-level American official, Chambers believes that in this war of ideologies, religion must be the motivator, and Shacochis allows this worldview to pervade the novel. Aside from the trading of drugs, global economic interests do not play a role for Chambers in the explosive mix that is today's world. Nevertheless, Shacochis's point is bigger than that of Jackie's relentless father, who eventually succumbs to dementia. The America Shacochis describes in this huge, carefully plotted, ideologically challenging book has somehow become one with the woman who lost her soul. But how did she lose her soul? That's the question at the heart of the novel, but one thing we know: her father is responsible for the loss. Chambers's personal flaws, offered up in lurid, chilling detail, are unforgivable - as may be his political flaws. To get back at the enemy, he is willing to use any weapon, even his lovely daughter. She's his weapon of choice. In the end, Burnette, whom we've learned to love, follows the lost, demented Chambers through the streets of Zagreb as the father rattles on about his daughter's fate. Meanwhile, the country the old man has helped to create seems to be on a crusade that, in its pursuit of vengeance and the endless war, looks a lot like jihad. AMY WILENTZ is the author, most recently, of "Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti."

In Shacochis's powerful novel of sex, lies, and American foreign policy, 1990s Haiti, Nazi-occupied Croatia, and Cold War-era Istanbul are shown as places where people are pulled into a vortex of personal and political destruction. After leaving Haiti's Truth Commission, lawyer Tom Harrington returns to Florida and family routine until a private investigator asks him to help a client accused of murdering his wife, Renee Gardner, whom Harrington knew in Haiti as Jackie Scott. Harrington once took Jackie to a voodoo priest so she could ask him to restore her soul, and in flashbacks we discover why. First, Shacochis shows Jackie's father, Stjepan, as an eight-year-old Croatian boy during the German occupation who witnesses his father's beheading and his mother's torture. Forty years later, a teenage Jackie, then called Dorothy Chambers, learns the meaning of secret service from her father, who's serving as an American diplomat in Turkey. A brutal American-style le Carre, Shacochis details how espionage not only reflects a nation's character but can also endanger its soul. Gritty characters find themselves in grueling situations against a moral and physical landscape depicted in rich language as war-torn, resilient, angry, evil, and hopeful. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* National Book Award winner Shacochis (Easy in the Islands, 1985) delivers a beautifully written, Norman Mailer-like (see Harlot's Ghost, 1991) treatise on international politics, secret wars, espionage, and terrorism. The woman is Jacqueline Scott, aka Renee Gardner, aka Dorothy Chambers nee Dorothy Kovacevic. Jacqueline is in Haiti (which Shacochis reported on in 1999, with The Immaculate Invasion), ostensibly as an uncredentialed photojournalist, but what she says to her guide, Tom Harrington, a humanitarian lawyer, is that she has lost her soul and seeks to find it through voodoo. She befuddles and frustrates poor Tom, who later returns to the island in the company of a (CIA?) spook to unravel the mystery of Jackie's death. Turns out that behind her several identities is her father, an uberspy who, as a child in Croatia, witnessed the beheading of his freedom-fighter father and the rape of his mother at the end of WWII. These awful events inspire Steven Chambers' lifelong crusade against communism and then against Islamic terrorism, with various schemes in various wars, from Vietnam through Bosnia. Often with weird, incestuous overtones, Chambers recruits his daughter to bring down enemies in elaborate sting operations, so that wars against narcotrafficking and terror become a family saga. The good guys of Chambers' powerful elite are all super-Christian, suggesting that at base we aren't any better than our enemies. The exception may be Eville Burnette, a Special Forces operative and an honorable, if conflicted, man. He and sad Dorothy fall in love and together find their souls. More or less. A brilliant book, likely to win prizes, with echoes of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John le Carre. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Shacochis' first novel in 20 years is a major literary event and will attract attention across the book world. Fortunately, the novel proves well worth the wait and justifies the attention.--Mort, John Copyright 2010 Booklist