Teresa Dovalpage’s latest murder mystery Queen of Bones explores lingering grudges between old friends and lovers separated by Castro’s final sanctioned raft exodus. Teresa Dovalpage has written a truly atmospheric mystery that delves deep into the theme of homecoming and all the secrets we think we leave behind. The novel’s greatest strength lies in Dovalpage’s excellent…
The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel and a surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers. In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death―and the truth about their marriage. Shortly…
Leonardo Padura is Cuba’s best-known author—though anyone other than a specialist would struggle to name another Cuban writer—and a winner of the Princess of Asturias Award, the Spanish-speaking world’s Nobel Prize for Literature. But up here in El Norte, we know him mostly for four detective novels he wrote in the 1990s featuring Lieutenant Mario…
The Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille is a blistering new novel featuring an exciting new character—U.S. Army combat veteran Daniel “Mac” MacCormick, now a charter boat captain, who is about to set sail on his most dangerous cruise. All 35-year-old Army vet Daniel “Mac” MacCormick wants to do is take out fishing groups on his…
I set my second novel in Cuba in the closing months of 1958, when American power brokers in Washington—namely the CIA, FBI, White House, and State Department—dithered between support for the corrupt but reliably pro-American Batista regime and the popular but largely unknown Castro-led rebellion. The tension between democratic ideals and predictable tyranny was on…
The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich is a suspenseful tale of Cold War espionage set in 1950s Cuba, where foreign powers compete to influence the outcome of a revolution. Former CIA Agent George Mueller arrives in Havana in August 1958—the last months before the fall of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista—to look into the activities of…
Heretics by Leonardo Padura is a sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author (available March 14, 2017). Within the pages of Leonardo Padura’s latest Mario Conde adventure, the reader can’t help noticing that atmosphere dominates—that squalor kind of atmosphere found in Raymond Chandler’s dirty Los Angeles streets…
Most of us love the idea of islands—their beauty, their singularity, their separation from the wider world. And, of course, we all believe that life may somehow be easier on islands, more laid back, simpler, even Edenic. But islands have their dark side, too. And just as most of us are drawn to the mythic…
Night Work by David C. Taylor is the second book in the transporting historical crime fiction, Michael Cassidy series (Available April 5, 2016). Michael Cassidy, a New York cop plagued by dreams that sometimes come true, escorts a prisoner accused of murder to Havana on the cusp of Fidel Castro's successful revolution against the Batista…
Vasili Arkhipov is one man who never had to question whether or not he did the right thing. In October 1962, when the world was holding its collective breath during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov was employed on a Soviet submarine just off the coast of Florida. The United States deployed warning charges designed to…
