No Way to Peace is about the courage of five women --- a refugee, a journalist, a widowed mother, a social worker, and a teacher --- caught up in Argentina’s war of terror during the 1970s. Their stories unfold through the eyes of Stephen Wyatt, an American banker in his early thirties who has volunteered to stay in Argentina and keep an eye on things after his American colleagues and their families have been evacuated for their safety. It is a time when foreign business managers as well as local managers who work for foreign companies are being kidnapped and held for ransom or simply killed by terrorists at the rate of more than one per week.

Stephen has just returned from New York, where he has finalized his divorce after a three-year separation from his wife, when he agrees to help a pair of CIA agents track the money that the terrorists have collected from their kidnappings. Evidently, they are laundering this money through his bank’s branch in Panama and using it to bring arms into the country. Though Stephen supports their goal of social justice, he opposes the methods used by the terrorists, who have murdered many innocent people, including his assistant, who left behind a wife and three children under the age of five. So his motive for helping the CIA is to stop the killing.

That evening he meets a young woman who has fled her country and is living under a false identity for reasons that he will eventually learn. She has taken the name of Cathy Linton, the heroine in Wuthering Heights, which she was encouraged to read by an American teacher assigned to the school in the slum where she grew up. Inspired by him, Cathy pursued her education to the university, where she was studying to be a teacher when her life was shattered by a terrifying event.

Stephen and Cathy fall in love, and they begin living together. He helps her get a regular job, and he introduces her to his friends: Chris, an American who works for a nonprofit organization committed to helping unemployed people start businesses; his wife Sofi, a social worker; Elena, a reporter for an English-language newspaper; Mario, a professor of political science at the university, and his wife Teresa, a school teacher; Francisco (“Paco”), a young priest who has dedicated his life to helping the poor in the slums (villas misera) that surround the city of Buenos Aires; and Vittoria, the young widow of his assistant who is trying to raise her three little girls without a father.

Always in danger, and often needing bodyguards to protect them, Stephen and Cathy try to build a life together, but when the military take over the government the war of terror escalates and their friends become targets for being involved in “subversive” activities. As Stephen tries to save them from being tortured and killed by the military, he gains a new perspective on the war, and from the women who deal with its havoc he learns the true meaning of courage.