I believe this was the final book read as part of my “Law and Literature” class in my final semester in law school, designed to reference the period of the 1980s.

The novel is set in a fiction Central American country predictably run by a right wing military regime. The usual cast of characters exists - the whisky priest, the nun, the CIA, the bad guy priest, the American abroad. Bad things happen and people are more complicated than they initially appear. Don’t remember too much about the book other than it being a real page turner.