The Heiress of Water : A Novel

When young Monica Winters Borrero loses her luminous mother in an accident at sea, she is exiled from the tropical paradise that was her home. Grieving and cut off from a life among El Salvador's elite, Monica and her American father move to Connecticut, vowing never to look back. Years later, an intriguing stranger, who has endured a terrible loss of his own, enters Monica's life, bearing an unusual request. Monica is propelled back to her lost world, retracing the shadowy last days of her mother, a marine scientist who had been on the brink of understanding the therapeutic applications of a rare, venomous sea creature. Now, her research is being corrupted by a secret clinic that claims the power to restore consciousness to the comatose. What Monica discovers will shatter the family's delicate truce with the past, and compel everyone involved to challenge their deepest notions of what it means to be alive. Atmospheric, thought-provoking, and timely. The Heiress of Water is a stunning parable of paradise lost and found. At 12, Monica Winters is forced to exchange her privileged life in El Salvador as the daughter of the beautiful and headstrong heiress (and amateur marine biologist) Alma Borrero Winters for a humdrum existence in Connecticut with her cuckolded father after unfaithful Alma and her lover are attacked by soldiers at a gathering place for Communist rebels. His body is recovered, but Alma is lost to the sea Years after her mother, an enigmatic daughter of one of Central America's wealthiest families, disappears during the height of El Salvador's civil war, Monica learns that scientific research that her mother had been conducting has been corrupted by a secret clinic. Original