Just as you can tell a lot about a person from their books, you can tell a lot about a person from their noir preferences. These are seven favorites from my shelf that show what kind of reader I am, and what I was inspired by while writing my novel, Repentance. The Latin American…
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…
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…
Everyone tends to read about the familiar; I’m never as contented as when I am curled up with an English country-house murder mystery, for example. But, challenging yourself to trying something new could open up—literally—a whole new world. Just think about the places you could travel via mystery! From the remote stretches of the Arctic…
