She writes in the opening lines of her gripping memoir Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Vodou, and Civil Strife in Haiti (Nation Books, N.Y., 352 pp.), "I registered the sound as gunfire but it was several seconds before I realized that it was live, and coming in my direction. A second, third, and fourth round of shots followed in quick succession, each one increasing in volume and proximity."

Within moments, thanks to Klarreich's vivid prose, her sharp eye for detail, and her keen storytelling ability, the reader is caught up in the immediacy of her plight. And, in a strange way, its surreal absurdity.

“I'd been thinking wooden trays, painted metalwork, and papier-mâché,”she writes a few pages later, “not machine guns, armed thugs, and military takeovers.”

In fact, within a few weeks of arriving in Haiti, Klarreich had become an eyewitness to a coup d'etat. Although she viewed it from underneath the table of a snack bar, where she and an acquaintance dove for cover, it would prove a transforming event in her life.

It changed her, at age 33, from a sometime businesswoman to committed journalist, leading her on a path strewn with danger, mystery and passionate love. All three were bound up in a volatile country, its people, and Haitian drummer Jean Raymond.

Attempting to explain the trajectory from her upper middle class upbringing in University Heights to life in impoverished Haiti, Klarreich tells me in a phone interview from Miami, "I've always loved to travel.”As a family, she and her three sisters and their parents Susan and (the late) Harold Klarreich traveled to Europe, Russia and Australia. On her own she went to Africa and Israel. So Haiti, initially, was just "one more experience."

However, she adds, "I wasn't prepared for how intriguing and seductive it was ... Once I got a little taste of another way of living and looking at life, I wanted more."

Shortly after the coup, Klarreich confided to a friend: “It's like history is being played out all around me, and I don't know what my role is.”

“Try reporting,”the friend suggested. “Take advantage of being in the right place at the right time.”

Her worried mom would have said she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Throughout her often harrowing tale of life in Haiti, in fact, Klarreich often refers to her mother's reactions as a kind of reality check on the often surreal events she both reports on and experiences.

Among the most surreal is her falling under the hypnotic spell of Vodou (voodoo). In the chapter titled “Vodou Jew,”she describes the five days she spends at a traditional and popular Vodou ceremony in a small village north of Port au Prince. At one point she becomes “possessed”by the Vodou spirit and vividly describes rolling in the dirt and the “alternating between euphoria and depression.”

“No feelings any rabbi evoked through any sermon I'd ever heard came close to reaching this kind of religious experience, ”she writes.

“I have no idea where that voodoo experience came from, ”Klarreich tells me; "it still freaks me out.”

Vodou aside, Klarreich spent her first years in Haiti learning to be a better reporter. Her first assignment, from the San Francisco Chronicle, was to write an 800-word, first-person account of the coup. She then went on to write for The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times occasionally, and other publications. She also did spots for Monitor Radio and NPR. These, along with letters she wrote to her best friend and her mom, would all serve as valuable resource material for Madame Dread.

The intriguing title of the book comes from the nickname Klarreich's Haitian friends gave her when she became involved with, and later married, Jean Raymond, the drummer in a popular Haitian street band. Jean Raymond proudly wears long dreadlocks; she therefore is Madame Dread.

The often tumultuous relationship of Jean Raymond and Klarreich, like the voodoo experience, also alternates between euphoria and depression; the latter is particularly true for Jean Raymond when he travels with Klarreich to the States for the birth of their son Kadja, now 14, and for family gatherings, or because spikes of violence in Haiti make it totally unsafe for the family to live there.

Yet Klarreich (much to the chagrin of her mother) seems undeterred by the usual violence endemic to Haiti. “How was it that I had become a person who understood violence to be routine?”she writes. Scaring her far more, she tells me, “is that I got used to the poverty because it was everywhere.”But seeing poverty daily, she adds, is simply "to accept it,”not be complacent about it.

One of Klarreich's more conflicted professional relationships has been with Jean Bertrande Aristide, elected Haiti's president in the first "free and democratic”elections in the country's 186-year history. Klarreich interviewed him when he was a charismatic parish priest, and she then followed him through his (disappointing) presidency and subsequent exile.

“I don't think he’s the devil and I have many criticisms”of him, she tells me. “But his good intentions were thwarted by his international advisers.”With so many “filters”between him and his people, “he lost touch with what was going on.”

Klarreich thinks it “not inconceivable”that Aristide will return to Haiti once again, should the candidate from his party win the election tentatively scheduled for this December. She plans to return to Haiti to cover that election.

Meanwhile, she and Kadja reside in Miami, and Jean Raymond now lives mainly in Haiti. Klarreich still writes for a variety of publications on a whole range of subjects, and she does volunteer work with the Haitian immigrant community in Florida and the nonprofit Women's Fund.

But her heart, it seems, is still in Haiti, the country that enabled her to "feel connected to things."

“What I did,”she tells me, “was in some way to change conditions, particularly in Cité Soleil, site of the most concentrated poverty. As a journalist, helping people better understand their country could facilitate change.”