#friends
I recently taped NPR radio show Alt.Latino with host Felix Contreras. It was a great show in which we discussed Latino
mystery authors and the musical “soundtrack” to the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series. The show will air in August when KING PESO, the 4th Detective Emilia Cruz mystery is released.
#reviewsNEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK by Ernesto Mallo sweeps us into dark times in Argentina with multi-layered characters, a mix of crime and mystery, and an intimate style that will have you turning pages at light speed.
Mallo’s
Inspector Perro Lascano has an unenviable job in turbulent Buenos Aires, Argentina. He’s a police superintendent during the right wing military junta’s rule. From 1976-1983, the military junta carried out a reign of state terrorism known as the Process of National Reorganization. Military as well as right-wing death squads hunted down and killed dissidents under the guise of stamping out socialism. Numbers vary but up to 30,000 people were killed, imprisoned or simply
disappeared.
Lascano does his job as trucks full of trigger-happy soldiers rumble down the street. He watches sobbing victims being rounded up and knows that his boss and other members of the justice system have been bought off. It seems like a “why bother” situation but Lascano has little
else besides his job since the accidental death of his wife. She haunts his dreams, blending into wakefulness, making Lascano one of the most intriguing characters I’ve run across in quite some time.
He's assigned to check out two bodies in a field. But when he arrives, there are three. Two are clearly murder squad victims which the police are not allowed to touch. The
other body is that of an older man killed in a markedly different manner, however, and Lascano can investigate.
The action then goes back in time and the crime unfolds. Greed, corruption, cheating women, and cruel thugs all feature, products of a paranoid nation in the midst of its own
destruction.
Lascano has other duties besides the murder investigation including a raid on a brothel where he discovers Eva, a leftist guerilla hiding from the murder squads. She’s a ringer for his dead wife and he takes her home. It's a good place for Eva to hide, a relationship develops,
then she, too, becomes caught up in the murder investigation.
Beyond the dramatic place and time, Mallo’s writing is notable for his dialogue. He doesn’t use standard quotation marks, but combines characters’ lines into an italicized paragraph. Other books have experimented with non-standard
dialogue formatting; Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD comes to mind, but none so effective as Mallo.
Italics are often reserved for a character’s thoughts. As a result, Mallo’s style creates intimacy and urgency. Conversations are only between two speakers and sentences are short and sharp. It
isn’t always clear which character is speaking, but it doesn’t matter. The outcome of the exchange is always clear and always moves the plot forward. Interestingly, the paragraphs grow larger as the book progresses, as if Mallo is getting us accustomed to the style.
For days after finishing
the book, I found myself obsessing over it. The ending offers both shock and hope in a twist strongly reminiscent of MILA 18 by Leon Uris, that epic novel of the Warsaw uprising during WWII.
Verdict: NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK mixes a helping of crime fiction with a compelling format, a riveting
setting, and an anti-hero main character. It’s one of the best mystery novels I’ve read so far this year. Check it out on Amazon.
