George Rabasa

The Wonder Singer
Mark Lockwood has been hired by the European opera star Mercé Casals, now in her eighties and living in Southern California, to write her memoirs. While in the middle of recording the Señora’s adventures with war, fame, scandal, seduction and betrayal, the diva dies of cardiac arrest in her bath. The ghost writer is left wth a silent client.

Armed with 500 hours of interviews on cassettes and his own ingenuity, Lockwood must piece together the missing gaps in the singer’s life. Out to thwart the writer’s claim on the Señora’s story are her former agent, Hollywood Hank, and best selling bio-sleezer Alonzo Baylor.

The Wonder Singer takes shape as a book-within-a-book and sweeps Lockwood along the dizzying chronology of the diva’s life, beginning with the card game in which her father loses her to Pep Saval, the rustic showman who becomes her mentor, father-figure, and seducer. Along the way, we follow her survival during the Spanish Civil War, her marriage to a philandering tenor, and her love affair with an exiled prince.

Lockwood is aided in his deadline race by a colorful set of characters, including a beautiful nurse specializing in deathbed cases; Orson LaPrima, worshipful opera buff; and Nolan Keefe, Mercé’s husband exiled to the exclusive Villa Age D’Or, and who may or may not have secrets to reveal.

In this contemporary caper Lockwood sorts through the rich, contradictory, and sometimes dark details of a grand, dramatic life. In the process he discovers that the lesson of Casals’ life is about finding a purpose and a voice for the stories that must be told.

New: The Cleansing

This new twist on the expatriate novel, somewhere between mystery and ethics conundrum, with nods to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and Paul Bowles, is about two very different men and their delayed but fated battle for retribution. Paul, a promising med student from the U.S. wending his way through heady, corrupt, and gorgeous Mexico City in the 1980s. Victor, a Mexican lawyer with a web of connections on both sides of the drug business, Paul’s would-be cultural as well as drug guide, who eventually betrays him.

What happens when the former friend reappears twenty years later, a cancer patient in the doctor’s pathology lab, shows that none of us can escape our secrets.

Flashing between the post-9/11 U.S. and 1980s Mexico, The Cleansing details a love triangle, or diamond, if you will. Adelle, a fearless American photojournalist, attracts both Paul and Victor, and the three become uneasy friends. Mexico City itself is the fourth player in this game, beautiful and decadent, urban and cosmopolitan, torn between policia and narcos, with the division not as clear as the expatriates first think.

The Cleansing is about a reckoning of moral culpability in a corrupt setting.
No matter our excuses, the past will come to find us.

Recent Publications
"Yolanda by Day," story, American Literary Review.
"Fallen Coconuts and Dead Fish," story, Green Hills.
"Ask Señor Totol," story, Hayden’s Ferry.
"Hay Soos Saves," story, North Dakota Quarterly.
"For the Solitary Soul," story, South Carolina Review.
"Three Incidents in the Early Life of El Perro," story, Atlanta Review.

Glass Houses: Stories
Winner of the Writer’s Voice Capricorn Award and the Minnesota Book Award, Glass Houses illuminates the delicate balance of our not-so-private lives and our ardent attempts to keep the structure sound, as jobs dissolve, neighborhoods are contaminated, relationships demand too much or don’t give enough, values collapse and illusions vanish.

Floating Kingdom: A Novel
Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, Floating Kingdom “has all the building blocks of a great read: greed and generosity; lust and purity; evil and innocence. There is a good tale here, interweaves with a healthy irreverence for Latin institutions of machismo, religion, and paternalism.”