You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In 1939, the Saint Louis sails into Havana with Jewish refugees seeking asylum. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the as his parents are kept on the vessel. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Inspector Conde is back to investigate the story of this lost painting.
A young transvestite found strangled in a Havana park. The stifling death of a beloved Cuba.
Leonardo Padura's gripping new mystery breaks with the traditions of the detective novel, tracing the provenance of a mystical statue through history, from the Crusades to modern-day Havana. Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favour of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money. Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans from the Crusades to present day Havana, by way of the Spanish Civil War. He must uncover the true provenance of the Madonna and solve the two murders triggered by the theft of the statue.
Scorching novel from a star of Cuban fiction. Second Conde mystery set in languid Havana.
Cuban writer Iván Cárdenas Maturell meets a mysterious foreigner on a Havana Beach who is always in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. Ivan quickly names him 'the man who loves dogs'. The man eventually confesses that he is the man who murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico.
In a detective story set against the backdrop of Hemingway's Cuba, the discovery of the skeletal remains of the victim of a forty-year-old murder on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, draws ex-cop Mario Conte back into the game to investigate a crime with roots in Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier.