Overview
A metafictional mystery set in Cuba past and present about a writer returning to her long-lost hometown, seeking the truth about two suspicious deaths
2020: Teresa, a fifty-something Cuban-born mystery writer living in New Mexico, gets an unexpected call from her childhood best friend, Estrella, inviting her to Havana. Estrella is determined to get answers about the purported murder-suicide of a teacher and a student at their high school, forty years ago. Though Teresa doesn’t quite understand why Estrella is taking the story so personally, she’s along for the ride, as the case is the plot of the first novel she had wanted to write, but never got to—because it lacked the proper ending.
1980: Fourteen-year-old Teresita, bespectacled, awkward and mystery novel–obsessed, is “nosy, but not a tattletale.” She knows who’s been skimming off the top of the amphetamine stash in her mother’s pharmacy, which teacher keeps cyanide in his cabinet at school, and that classmate Yoyi and English teacher Felipe are having an affair. Over the course of one fateful day in March, Teresita gets one step closer to learning the Truth of Life . . . and death.
In writing herself as a character, Teresa Dovalpage has created a warm and thought-provoking puzzle-box of a novel, revealing as much about the present as it does the past.
2020: Teresa, a fifty-something Cuban-born mystery writer living in New Mexico, gets an unexpected call from her childhood best friend, Estrella, inviting her to Havana. Estrella is determined to get answers about the purported murder-suicide of a teacher and a student at their high school, forty years ago. Though Teresa doesn’t quite understand why Estrella is taking the story so personally, she’s along for the ride, as the case is the plot of the first novel she had wanted to write, but never got to—because it lacked the proper ending.
1980: Fourteen-year-old Teresita, bespectacled, awkward and mystery novel–obsessed, is “nosy, but not a tattletale.” She knows who’s been skimming off the top of the amphetamine stash in her mother’s pharmacy, which teacher keeps cyanide in his cabinet at school, and that classmate Yoyi and English teacher Felipe are having an affair. Over the course of one fateful day in March, Teresita gets one step closer to learning the Truth of Life . . . and death.
In writing herself as a character, Teresa Dovalpage has created a warm and thought-provoking puzzle-box of a novel, revealing as much about the present as it does the past.
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