Attorney Willa Jansson’s mother has never balked at breaking the law, especially not for a good cause. So when Willa learns her mother has flouted federal regulations and gone off to Cuba, she figures it's just a harmless pilgrimage to lefty Graceland. But when her mother doesn’t return with the rest of her peacenik tour group, Willa fears her mother’s bleeding heart may finally have gotten her into more trouble than she can get herself out of. But when Willa risks her career and passport by rushing to Cuba to retrace her mother’s steps, she finds that nothing there is quite as it seems. Following clues to neighborhoods tourists never see, through secret tunnels beneath the street, and into the finest luxury hotels, Willa is manipulated, misled, and nearly arrested. And in the meantime, newfound reporter friends—or are they CIA agents?—disappear as suddenly and inexplicably as her mother did. In a deadly game of cat and mouse, Willa follows her mother’s trail from Havana to Mexico City, from California back to Havana…all the while keeping barely one step ahead of two angry governments and at least one ruthless killer. Lia Matera is a graduate of Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor in chief of the Constitutional Law Quarterly . She was also a Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School before becoming a full-time writer of legal mysteries. Prior Convictions and A Radical Departure were nominated for Edgar Allan Poe awards. The Good Fight and Where Lawyers Fear to Tread were nominated for Anthony and Macavity Awards. She has written nine novels, including the critically acclaimed Face Value . Matera lives in Santa Cruz, California. Chapter 1 I often hear people complain about their mothers. But I'd celebrate if all my mother did was skewer me with advice and bore me with anecdotes. I think anyone who hasn't had to bail her mother out of jail cells full of demonstrators is lucky. Anyone who can guiltlessly utter a cynicism or consort with an occasional Republican is lucky. My mother once organized a petition drive to oust the man of my dreams from office. (Needless to say, that cooled the romance.) And she'd objected to every job I'd held since graduating from law school -- except the ones that didn't pay enough to live on. Even now that I'm a sole practitioner there's no convincing her I'm not "holding up the capitalist structure." But the capper, as far as I'm concerned, was last year, when my mother flew to Cuba with a bevy of gray-haired brigadistas, then failed to return with them. When fourteen sweet and unpretentious women dedicated to not hugging their children with nuclear arms filed off the plane, I could tell by their faces that something was wrong. Global Exchange and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had, by natural selection, assembled an ecstatic group prepared to bliss out on revolution. The women should have been flushed with the rapture of connection, they should have had that noble Dances with Revolutionaries look. Instead, they looked worried and confused. And members of WILPF rarely look confused. They are the Jewish mothers of politics, ready to chicken-soup the whole third world. So I knew something had gone wrong. But, foolishly, I thought maybe they'd been disillusioned. I thought maybe something had cracked their rose-colored lenses. I should have known better. I'd accompanied Mother to an itinerary meeting filled with women who couldn't stop exclaiming about Cuba's excellent schools and health care, the warmth of its people, and the fact that no racial inequality existed there. My mild question about political prisoners provoked a temper tantrum about our CIA-backed press and the hypocrisy of blockading Cuba while maintaining relations with governments of torturers. I followed up -- at considerable risk to my mother's reputation -- with some particulars about a recently jailed poet. Until her sudden fall from favor, she'd been relentlessly trotted forth as an epitome of the Cuban spirit. Could a repressive regime produce a world-class poet? Castro argued. "A perfect example of distortion by a biased press," one of the Fidelistas sniffed. "When we asked our Cuban hosts about that, they explained that since the U.S. is waging war on Cuba, certain things the poet did were tantamount to treason." I let the war on Cuba slide. "What things?" "Well, she was talking to foreign journalists." The woman's voice was hushed with disapproval. "She was leafleting." Leafleting. Any woman in the room would run into a burning house to save her stash of WILPF pamphlets. Most would sacrifice family photos before they'd let their leaflets burn. My mother poked me in the ribs. "You have to understand their context, Baby -- their whole economy is being ruined by our government! They have a right to try and stop that." Leaflets were powerful weapons, all right: look how WILPF's tracts had brought the Republicans to their knees. Since that ev