Missing Faith : A Novel

About the Book

MISSING FAITH Faith Hopkins had it all; a loving family, close friends, a fiancé, a Liberal Arts degree from Boston College, but God called her to do more with her life. So she joined the Peace Corps to save the world, and found happiness serving the poor until the day she disappeared in the jungles of Paraguay. Set amidst the political turmoil of Paraguay in the early 1980’s, Missing Faith casts the fates of Jesús, a Paraguayan journalist, and Eva Marie, a Peace Corps volunteer, together as they risk their lives to search for the missing Peace Corps volunteer by confronting repression of military dictatorship – and their inner demons. Striving to find meaning in his life, Jesús grapples with the loss of religious belief and doubts about loving his wife. Desperate to escape the pain of her past, Eva Marie struggles to overcome the opiate of casual sex, and instead tries to give love one more chance. More than a suspense thriller, Missing Faith combines a volatile mix of sex, love, violence, freedom, dignity, and justice balanced by a strong dose of satire. A disparate conglomeration of characters, including priests, nuns, revolutionaries, indigenous tribal leaders, idealistic Americans, sadistic Paraguayan military, jaded American diplomats, and enduring campesinos, resemble the moral complexity of Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter and the sexual romp of self-discovery in Paul Theroux’s My Secret Life. Most of all, this tale is an extraordinary journey in search of faith as well as Faith.

About the Author

Over the past four decades Peter Cox mopped the floor at Dunkin' Donuts, worked in a candle factory, framed homes, back-packed through Europe, hitched-hike to the West Coast, hopped a freight train across Canada, wrote for the U-Mass Daily Collegian, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America, functioned as a paralegal in a refugee office on the Tex-Mex border, earned a M.A. in economics from the University of Texas, organized tenant unions in Salem, Massachusetts, and worked as an urban planner in Irvine, California. He has published several novels including Donuts, Missing Faith, On the Run with Jack Frost, and Blended Borders (Xlibris.com). Presently, he is making ends meet, persevering in the Great Recession and (trying to) keeping hope alive.