I’m very happy to finally share the cover of my newest novel, The Novel Detective, part of the Havana Mystery series.  

All my books contain a bit of me, but The Novel Detective is the most personal up to date. I am both character and detective: Teresita, a fourteen-year-old girl who, more or less by chance, witnesses a double murder in the middle school she attends, and that same girl forty years later, now a crime novelist living in Hobbs, who goes back to Havana to figure out what actually happened in 1980.

Like Teresita, I attended middle school in La Manzana de Gómez (now the Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski). Like Teresita, I was snoopy and somewhat sly. And like Teresa, I now write crime novels and live in Hobbs…

The other characters are composites of people I knew: classmates, neighbors, janitors and teachers. Teresita’s mother, like my own, worked at La Central pharmacy, located on the ground floor of the building.

The building itself, La Manzana, is also a character. Back then it was said to be haunted and felt in fact spooky, with many rooms closed off and some mysterious flights of stairs that we called “tunnels of love.”

I’ll write more about all this very soon, but for now I wanted to share the happy news. You can preorder The Novel Detective here.