Angustias, Puerto Rico, 1982"Even a tropical paradise can have its little murders..." In the early morning hours, a neighbor named Tomas Villareal knocks on the door of the home of Luis Gonzalo, the sheriff of Angustias, a small town in the mountains of Puerto Rico. Tomas reports that his son is missing, and the sheriff agrees to help search for the boy. Gonzalo is certain there is a simple explanation--that the child has just wandered off to visit a friend or fallen asleep in a field. But then a second child is reported missing, and there are no clues to her whereabouts either. Soon the sheriff, the parents, and the entire town are searching frantically, but the horrors have only just begun. Gonzalo begins to suspect an organized plot to harm the children of Angustias, and he races against the clock to prevent the town's children from disappearing one by one.
The small town of Angustias, Puerto Rico has many eccentric residents, but few that are dangerous. The predators come from the United States as Sheriff Luis Gonzales faces a crime wave like none that he has seen in his twenty years on the job. It begins when Samuel is locked in a shack by his sister Marisol who wants to meet her boyfriend but she doesn't release him; his parents believe he was abducted. Luis thinks he was snatched by one of the three sexual predators who have come to Puerto Rico to kidnap children, break them in and sell them on the American sex slave commodity market. One of the pedophiles Anthony Borden is on his honeymoon but in his spare time will break in a boy that they abducted. Ironically, the car crashes, the boy dies and Borden is totally paralyzed. The other monster David Poole is arrested while trying to help Anthony get away and left to the tender mercies of a sheriff from a neighboring area. The third criminal Julie Acevedo is the facilitator who disappears but another child is in a coma and they are waiting for her to regain consciousness to tell them what she knows. The antagonists in Steven Torres latest tale are thoroughly repugnant and totally without conscience. In a macabre way it is interesting to watch them act normally until they have to conduct their business. This is a frightening story about acting without thinking and parents who don't supervise children. This action thriller is wrapped around a social issue and it gives no answer to the problems of sexual predators, it does open the eyes of the audiences to teen actions and the consequences that result from them. Harriet Klausner
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