An unbelievable romance blooms amid family rivalries, office politics and scandalous rumors in Rivera's third novel, a strange and disappointing read. Melody More, a savvy, sexy reporter for the Hudson County, N.J., newspaper Chronotope
, is covering a congressman's speech at a high school when the school, inexplicably, is bombed. More survives, but the congressman and his wife are "blown to smithereens" along with 425 others. A year later, the congressman's brother-in-law, Mateo Irigaray, returns to town to clear out the congressman's house, and More recognizes him as the child prodigy who had dominated local news decades earlier. When she interviews him, she finds he is now an unemployed, belligerent and suicidal drunk. Even so, she is attracted to him—much to the dismay of her editor and ex-lover, Xoan Xavier Contreras. Melody works on winning Mateo over, but the affair is jeopardized by revelations about their intertwined histories. The cast of woefully single-minded characters (who speak in bursts of campy dialogue) do little to temper the plot's ridiculous twists. (Sept. 30)
