From Publishers Weekly
"We understand the economics of love," says Mrs. Armstrong, a sexy American socialite residing in Cuba. "To really sell a torch song, you've got to be willing to light yourself on fire." Like her, an entire gallery of wonderfully eccentric characters seems ready to go up in flames in this flamboyant noir epic by Sanchez (Mile Zero; Zoot-Suit Murders). It is 1957 in Havana, and glamorous, ambitious young insurance agent King Bongo ("he was a little man, but he had a big plan") is primed to sell a major policy to the owner of the legendary Tropicana nightclub. On New Year's Eve, he heads for the club, where his sister-the island's most glittery showgirl, known as the Panther-is performing. But before Bongo can do his business, a bomb goes off in front of the stage, and in the havoc the Panther disappears. To find her, Bongo must travel from colonial country clubs to squalid alleyways, challenged by sinister rivals like the nefarious Humberto Zapata, an official in the island's secret police force, and threatened by a constant undertone of seduction, violence and revolutionary stirrings. Sanchez's writing can evoke the hard-boiled masters of the past-he describes Havana's rows of houses, for example, as "old tarts posing for a group reunion shot in the glare of tropical sunlight"-though his stylings sometimes spin out of control ("Guys spilled the guts of their lies as beer foamed, whiskey flowed, rum drummed"). The occasional sloppiness aside, however, he succeeds in creating an independent world that is at once highly stylized and believable.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Havana in the '50s--a time of unrivaled corruption and decadence, when the nightclub lights were bright and the big-finned cars still shiny--has often served as the backdrop for fiction and film, but too often the city has functioned only as window dressing for neon-lit melodrama. That isn't the case here, as Sanchez digs deeper, using place as a conduit to meaning and emotion, just as he did with Key West in the hypnotic
Mile Zero (1989). The action begins on New Year's Eve, 1957, when a bomb explodes at the Tropicana nightclub, presumably the work of revolutionaries. King Bongo, a legendary Havana drummer, who doubles as a private investigator and insurance salesman, narrowly escapes the blast, but his sister, the club's featured showgirl, called the Panther, disappears in the aftermath. His search for her takes him to all levels of Havana society--from the "scent of rank sweaty desperation" to the "look of well-fed cologne-slapped cheeks"--and involves him with Mafia hit men, fading movie stars, a mysterious American socialite, and the head of Cuba's secret police, long a nemesis. The Byzantine plot is neatly constructed and thoroughly involving but never an end in itself. Sanchez shows us a city and a people on the eve of revolution but filters it all through the emotions of a conflicted hero, sympathetic to the cause but loyal only to himself and those he loves. Havana is both setting and soul in this pulsing bolero of a novel.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
