Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge

Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge by Berlow, Alan. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780679747895.

This moody, brilliantly atmospheric work of reportage is the story of three murders that took place on the Philppine island of Negros. The first victim was a wealthy landowner. The second was an impoverished farmer who was massacred, along with his wife and three children, in a barrio whose name means "the place of the ghosts." The third was a young soldier, who may have been killed by communist guerrillas or on the orders of his commanding officer. On Negros, every death has many stories. In tracing the shadowy connections among these events, Alan Berlow, a correspondent for National Public Radio, portrays a society in which democracy is at best a hopeful fiction and everyone is a collaborator by necessity. Beautifully written, rich in ambiguity, and as riveting as any crime thriller, Dead Season is a work of tragic depth and complexity. "Like a tale from Faulkner or Marquez...a saga of surprisingly majestic proportions."--Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague "A passionately written tale about the chaos at the edge of the twenty-first century."--John Hockenberry, author of Moving Violations