The Novel Detective

A twisty, genre-bending metafictional mystery set in Cuba past and present about a writer returning to her long-lost hometown to seek the buried truth about two suspicious deaths at her Havana high school, perfect for fans of Chanel Cleeton and Jean Hanff Korelitz

2020: Teresa, a Cuban-born mystery writer now living in America, gets an unexpected call from her childhood best friend, Estrella, inviting her to Havana. Estrella is determined to get answers about a case that has haunted them both for decades: the purported murder-suicide of a teacher and a student at their high school. Though Teresa doesn’t quite understand why Estrella is taking the story so personally, she’s along for the ride—as she always wanted to write a novel about this case. Once they’re in Havana, the past resurfaces, and together they hope to uncover what really happened that day before the truth disappears for good.

1980: Fourteen-year-old Teresita, bespectacled, awkward and mystery novel–obsessed, is “nosy, but not a tattletale.” She knows who’s been skimming off the top of the amphetamine stash in her mother’s pharmacy, which teacher keeps cyanide in his cabinet at school and that their classmate Yoyi is sleeping with their English teacher. Over the course of one fateful day, Teresita gets closer than ever to learning the “Truth of Life”—her catchall term for the intricacies of adult existence—even though it means coming face to face with death.

Directly inspired by the author’s own childhood in Cuba and adult life in the United States and drawing upon the tradition of Latin American magical realism, this resonant tale is at once personal and universal, full of nostalgia, candor and danger.