I am so thankful to The Star for listing Death under the Perseids among “4 new mysteries to keep you reading late into the dark and stormy night”.

And for putting me in such good company!

Mercedes Spivey, the narrator and central character in this refreshing and elusive Cuban crime novel, is thirty years old, a little saucy and a lot tragique. She’s Havana-born, but now lives with her American academic husband in Florida. When the couple win (is it really a win or something more nefarious than that?) a cruise ship holiday to Cuba, Mercedes’s previous life keeps getting in the way. Certainly there’s crime in her past — and strange coincidences on the cruise. One of her novelist friends has swiped another author friend’s manuscript and passed it off as his own. There could have been a murder back there too. But in this story, violent death takes place only off stage and news of it is withheld until the very last moment. In every way, this is an unorthodox story.

Published on The Star