Review by Booklist Review
Cuban police detective Mario The Count Conde still feels solidarity with writers, crazy people, and drunkards, but his melancholy seems to be seeping even deeper into his soul in this fourth installment of Padura's Havana Quartet. The existential angst that grips the Count is only aggravated by concern for his wheelchair-bound best friend, the 300-pound Skinny, and frustrations with his latest case, the murder of a 26-year-old teacher at Conde's former high school. But that's before he meets a sultry, redheaded saxophone player with legs like Corinthian columns. Trouble? Of course, but it's such sweet sorrow. Padura's lush, free-flowing prose seems overwrought now and then, but it is the perfect vehicle to describe both the crumbling elegance of Havana and the tortured emotional agonies of a hopelessly romantic yet terminally morose hero. The four Conde novels read as a kind of four-part bolero, each more moody and rum-soaked than its predecessor. For hard-boiled fiction fans who are soft-boiled at heart and who can't get enough of Debussy, Ravel, and Frank Sinatra singing In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mario Conde, Padura's tormented Cuban police detective, is at his anguished best in this sequentially second volume of the so-called Havana Quartet, which constitutes a four-season chronicle of one year (1989) in Conde's life, though it's the last of the four to be available in English translation. The hard-drinking, romantic Conde, who's wanted to become a writer but ended up as a policeman in a corrupt and struggling land, constantly questions his fate as he investigates the murder of young, good-looking school teacher, Lissette Nunez Delgado, who taught at Pre-University High School, the same school Conde attended in his youth. Conde's return to his old school triggers nostalgia and regrets as he interviews the headmaster, students and fellow teachers. The original title, Vientos de Cuaresma (The Winds of Lent), captures the extensive wind imagery that Padura skillfully uses to capture Conde's state of mind. (June 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
