In my quest for novels set in hot southern countries, my most recent discovery is this Cuban writer. I think this is the first book in his Havana Quartet (the edition I have and Amazon identified it as such, but in a preface he wrote for another book, the author said Pasado Perfecto is the first in the quartet, but that one doesn’t seem to have been published in English yet). Police Lieutenant Mario Conde, “the Count,” is one of those haunted, poetic detectives that I always favor. In this lyrical and dark novel of Havana before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Count has to track down the murderer of a transvestite in a city park—in circumstances that at first appear to be just another pick-up gone wrong. As the Count and his team search further, they learn the young man, although gay, was not a transvestite, is the son of a wealthy and prominent family, and has ties to the dramatic and literary world that stretch back to Paris in the 1960s. During the investigation, the Count becomes friends with a shadowy older man who has been a legend in Cuba’s suppressed literary world. This is not a light or fast read, but it is worth it. I’ve already started the second (or is it the third?) book of the Quartet.
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