Havana Best Friends

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

José Latour has earned a reputation as one of the most successful Latin
American writers of crime fiction. A long-time finance functionary in
the Cuban revolutionary government, he fled the country with his family
in 2002 to settle in Toronto. His other novels in English include Havana
World Series, Comrades in Miami, and Outcast.

Replete with suspense, local colour, and quirky characters, Havana Best
Friends has all the ingredients of a page-turning crime thriller. The
fast-paced narrative details the scheme devised by a vicious U.S.
Vietnam ex-soldier to extract $10 million in diamonds from the wall of a
Havana apartment bathroom, occupied by an unsuspecting schoolteacher.
The American crook and his Argentine female partner make use of
nefarious plans, even murder, to spirit away the diamonds with the help
of the now-involved Cuban schoolteacher. Meanwhile, in the other world
of Cuban legal justice, the police, the intelligence agency, and other
unsavoury sleuths follow the trail of dead bodies, struggling in the
face of bureaucratic inertia and corruption.

Latour cunningly leads his readers along a path of deceit and death,
lies and bribery, as the protagonists (and others) seek a way to remove
themselves and the fortune from a country light-years removed from the
socialist paradise that Fidel’s 1959 revolution was supposed to
create.