Head Games

A Latino bar in Toronto, 1978. The men can't take their eyes off Lisa, but there is something about her. She is a little too intense, a little too needy, a woman with too many games playing in her head. Don, a realtor with a murky South American past, is unfazed. He listens patiently when Lisa tells him she is looking for her father, a wealthy man living in Argentina. Or so she says. Determined to find her roots, Lisa goes to Argentina. It's a journey born of longing for love and the desperate need for something solid to hold on to. Don offers to come along. He is on a mission of his own, looking for his run-away daughter, Asu, a Quechua girl he adopted in Argentina. Or so he says. Soon Lisa acquires a second escort: Santos, a man with connections to the spirit world. He does seances with Lisa because only the saints can help her. Or so he says. Is Santos a charlatan, or a shaman fighting the eternal battle of good against evil? Lisa's search for her father dead-ends. Instead she finds love with Jim, an architect on foreign assignment in Argentina. A happy ending is in sight, when Lisa's life turns into a nightmare. She becomes a pawn in the deadly feud between Santos and Don over Asu. This is a twist on the old story of a young woman running an obstacle course of deception in her quest for love. Argentina in the 70s is a country where kidnapping and violent death no longer make headlines, a country where Lisa learns a new set of survival skills.

I grew up in Vienna and came to Canada in 1965. In 1980, Rummel published her first short story, in Quarry, and taught courses on Renaissance history at U of T. After resettling in Toronto, she was hired by the Department of History at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo,where she received a Full Professorship, SSHRC grants, and fellowships in Germany and the US. She spent 1999/2000 in Los Angeles as a Getty Fellow and fell in love with the city, its museums, beaches and mountains. Her first novel, Playing Naomi, builds on that experience.