Poso Wells
SynopsisPlot
"In the squalid settlement of Poso Wells, women have been regularly disappearing, but the authorities have shown little interest. When the leading presidential candidate comes to town, he and his entourage are electrocuted in a macabre accident witnessed by a throng of astonished spectators. The sole survivor—next in line for the presidency—inexplicably disappears from sight.
Story
About this book
In Poso Wells, a neglected settlement where women have been vanishing without official concern, a presidential candidate arrives for a campaign visit. He and most of his entourage die in a bizarre mass electrocution, observed by a crowd of onlookers. The one survivor, who stands next in line for the presidency, then vanishes without explanation. These two threads of disappearance, the political and the personal, set the plot in motion.
Gustavo Varas, a journalist guided by principle, begins tracing the missing candidate and finds himself pulled into a violent and lawless layer of society. Bella Altamirano, a determined resident of Poso Wells, pursues her own investigation into the missing women, pressing against a local culture of silence despite receiving death threats. Their separate paths converge as the connections between the political disappearance and the fate of the women come into view, pointing toward a multinational scheme to exploit Ecuador's cloud forest.
Gabriela Alemán is an Ecuadorian author, and Poso Wells was her first work published in English. The novel operates across genres, combining elements of noir fiction, ecological thriller, and feminist narrative within a story rooted in questions of political corruption, land exploitation, and institutional indifference.
