Death in Precinct Puerto Rico: Book Two
A Luis Gonzalo Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Angustias, Puerto Rico, 1990.
Even a tropical paradise can have its little murders.
Luis Gonzalo, sheriff of the small town of Angustias in Puerto Rico's central mountains, knows all there is to know about the people he has worked to protect for more than two decades. He knows that Elena Maldonado was beaten as a child. He knows that she was beaten as a wife. But when she winds up dead on the same day that she brings her newborn home from the hospital, he doesn't know who has killed her.
Elena's drunken husband seems like the obvious culprit, but after a grisly attack in front of the Angustias police station, potential suspects come out of the woodwork and multiply. The case is further complicated when someone breaks into the crime scene, but no one can figure out what, if anything, was taken.
Before the case is solved, Gonzalo and his deputies will be hard pressed to be certain that justice has been served, and the town of Angustias will be changed forever. A man will die in Gonzalo's arms, a trusted friend will be brutalized, and a fortune worth millions will change hands. Throughout all the turmoil, Gonzalo will keep two special people in mind: Elena Maldonado, the young woman whose life of constant abuse the sheriff had been unable to salvage, and her child, so soon left motherless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the remote town of Angustias, Puerto Rico, where the local police are derogatorily nicknamed gandules (greenbeans) by their metropolitan peers, Torres's follow-up to last year's series debut provides more fast-paced, nonstop action. Sheriff Luis Gonzalo faces the murder case of his career. Habituated to the routine assignments of provincial life, Gonzalo has always wished for something more exciting, more demanding. And now that a close friend, the young abused mother of a newborn, is brutally stabbed to death in her house, his yearning has unfortunately been realized. What begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case becomes intensely complicated. Gonzalo and his deputies comb the increasing number of crime scenes for evidence to indict first one, then another and ultimately many more evil perpetrators. The novel, however, sometimes moves almost too quickly, and the sheriff's ability to ferret out the truth from the mass of tenuous and nebulous threads linking it all together appears farfetched. The tangled crime web unravels almost seamlessly in the duration of less than a day's work. Still, Torres's portrait of a most eclectic group of Puerto Ricans should particularly satisfy those readers interested in a culture that hitherto hasn't received much attention in mystery fiction.
