In the Ruins

Parole Officer Maria Peres confronts Brooklyn’s volatile streets and disturbing incidents in her own past while hunting a parole violator who has committed a particularly heinous crime. More profoundly, the novel explores a young woman’s search for a meaningful life in a flawed world where morality is relative and terrible acts are committed gratuitously. The poetry of one of the novel’s characters provides a further level of exploration. While ostensibly narrating the Aztec’s fall to the conquistadors, the verse, by suggesting a parallel between the historical characters in the poem and the characters in the novel itself, leads to reflections on the ambiguous nature of individuality and its relationship to the past.