Mario Conde investigates a murder in the Barrio Chino, the rundown Chinatown of Havana. Not his usual beat, but when Conde was asked to take the case by his colleague, the sultry, perfectly proportioned Lieutenant Patricia Chion, a frequent object of his nightly fantasies, he could n't resist. The case proves to be unusual. Pedro Cuang, a lonely old man, is found hanging naked from a beam in the ceiling of his dingy room. One of his fingers has been amputated and a drawing of two arrows was engraved with a knife on his chest. Was this a ritual Santería killing or a just a sordid settling of accounts in a world of drug trafficking that began to infiltrate Cuban society in the 1980s? Soon Conde discovers unexpected connections, secret businesses and a history of misfortune, uprooting and loneliness that affected many immigrant families from China. As ever with Padura, the story is soaked in atmosphere: the drinking of rum in deliciously smoke-filled bars, the friendships, the...

From Leonardo Padura—whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix's Four Seasons in Havana—The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history.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 favor 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 deRegla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the...

Scorching novel from a star of Cuban fiction. The return of Mario Conde.

A scorching novel from a star of Cuban fiction. The third in the Havana Quartet series.

A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban authorIn 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana's port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear. Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel's son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family's lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of...

The story of Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky. Moving seamlessly between Cuba where Mercader lived out the last years of his life, Mercader's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, it is the story of revolutions fought and betrayed, the ways in which men's which men's political convictions are continually tested and manipulated.

Scorching novel from a star of Cuban fiction. The fourth of the Havana Quartet series.

Scorching novel from a star of Cuban fiction. Second Conde mystery set in languid Havana.

A young transvestite found strangled in a Havana park. The stifling death of a beloved Cuba.