Precious Absence

Kostas Jack Wilson, great-great-grandson of the Paiute mystic, Wovoka, ingeniously turns upside down the presumption that a prospector’s luck depends on finding what he is looking for. After four years of work and a million dollars invested in his silver mining project in Honduras, Kostas had found nothing, yet he has convinced international mining companies to bid millions for his project. Like most miners and prospectors, he found wealth in mere promise.When he is mysteriously ambushed by Honduran sicarios, it is up to his wife, Grace, in Nevada and his Latin mistress, Pilar, in Honduras to work together to salvage the project for the sake of their many US investors and the indigenous Lencas in Honduras, whom Kostas had hoped to benefit. When Grace travels to Honduras to claim his body, she discovers he sired four-year-old daughter, Antu—named after the famous Lenca princess who successfully repelled the conquistadores in the sixteenth century. Kostas’s graduate school chums from the Mackey School of Mines in Reno, Nevada, team up to unravel the elaborate plan concocted by Kostas. The multinational mining companies, one headquartered in Canada and the other in China, prove to be no match for the determined women Kostas left behind.