mission oblivion

Incapable of putting her own pieces back together, Professor Blanca Perea desperately accepts what she anticipates will be a tedious academic project. Her personal stability has just collapsed, her marriage has blown up. Confused and devastated, fleeing to the insignificant Californian university of Santa Cecilia is her only option.
The campus that welcomes her turns out, however, to be much more seductive than expected, stirred in those days by a civic movement against the destruction of a legendary landscape in order to build a huge shopping center there. And the work that absorbs her—the cataloging of the legacy of her old compatriot Andrés Fontana, who died decades ago—is far from being as insubstantial as she had promised.
As she strives to give structure to the memory of that forgotten Hispanist, Daniel Carter, a veteran and attractive American colleague who is not in the place he should be, grows closer to her. Between both men, one through his posthumous testimonies and the other with his growing complicity, Blanca will be dragged into a web of mixed feelings, hidden intrigues, and unopened doors.
Why did no one ever bother to rescue what Andrés Fontana left behind after his death? Why, after thirty years, is someone interested in everything being uncovered at last? What does the unfinished work of the old Hispanist have to do with everything that is happening now in Santa Cecilia? What prompted him to unearth the untold history of the missions of the Camino Real? Before finding answers, Blanca still has a lot to understand.

Incapable of putting her own pieces back together, Professor Blanca Perea desperately accepts what she anticipates will be a tedious academic project. Her personal stability has just collapsed, her marriage has blown up. Confused and devastated, fleeing to the insignificant Californian university of Santa Cecilia is her only option.
The campus that welcomes her turns out, however, to be much more seductive than expected, stirred in those days by a civic movement against the destruction of a legendary landscape in order to build a huge shopping center there. And the work that absorbs her—the cataloging of the legacy of her old compatriot Andrés Fontana, who died decades ago—is far from being as insubstantial as she had promised.
As she strives to give structure to the memory of that forgotten Hispanist, Daniel Carter, a veteran and attractive American colleague who is not in the place he should be, grows closer to her. Between both men, one through his posthumous testimonies and the other with his growing complicity, Blanca will be dragged into a web of mixed feelings, hidden intrigues, and unopened doors.
Why did no one ever bother to rescue what Andrés Fontana left behind after his death? Why, after thirty years, is someone interested in everything being uncovered at last? What does the unfinished work of the old Hispanist have to do with everything that is happening now in Santa Cecilia? What prompted him to unearth the untold history of the missions of the Camino Real? Before finding answers, Blanca still has a lot to understand.