LOCAL author John Baker is best known for his series of York-set thrillers featuring private eye Sam Turner.

In Winged With Death, he makes a pretty radical departure.

It is 1972 and 18-year-old seaman Frederick Boyle jumps ship in Uruguay. In the country’s capital, Montevideo, the penniless Frederick is befriended by the older Julio Ferrari, a Uruguayan with distinctly radical tendencies.

It is a dangerous time to be a radical: Uruguay is on the brink of a brutal dictatorship, and citizens who speak out of turn begin disappearing.

But Frederick falls in love: first with the city, then with a woman, and then with a dance – the tango.

Renamed Ramon Bolio, he determines to become a Milonguero, or master of the dance. But around him the disappearances continue as the darkness grows.

Years later, an older Ramon looks back on those heady years in Montevideo from his native York. Then things take a sinister turn. Hannah, his beloved niece, disappears. Is this an echo of the disappearances in Uruguay so long ago? And what does it all have to do with Ramon himself?

Baker captures beautifully the danger and exoticism of Montevideo and young love in a strange climate. His ageing Ramon, looking back on those times, is older and wearier but, when Hannah goes missing, retains the ability to feel.

A slow-paced, reflective novel that yet builds an effective sense of tension and is rich with meditations on time, denial, revolution and fear: as well as with a seductive delight in the sensuousness and anger of the most famous dance of them all.