Havana Requiem
A Legal Thriller
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Fueled by alcohol and legal brilliance, Michael Seeley once oversaw his law firm's most successful litigation. Until it all fell apart. Recklessness and overreach cost him his wife, his job, and likely the life of his last client, a Chinese dissident journalist. Havana Requiem, the latest Seeley novel from the acclaimed author Paul Goldstein, opens after a year's sobriety has earned Seeley back most of what he lost: the partnership in his Manhattan law firm, if not his corner office; the wary respect of most of his partners; the lucrative clients—but not the gin-sharpened passion.
Then the renowned Cuban musician Héctor Reynoso enters his office with a simple request: help him and other composers who defined Cuba's musical golden age of the 1940s and '50s—the music that made the Buena Vista Social Club internationally famous—reclaim the copyright to their work. When Reynoso goes missing, Seeley's reluctant promise to help draws him progressively deeper into Havana's violent underbelly and a decades-long conspiracy that runs from the partners in his firm to the U.S. State Department to Cuba's security police, who are willing to do anything to suppress the truth. In the heat of Havana, Seeley will lose himself to his worst and best passions as his pursuit of justice becomes a desperate gambit to save not only his composers but the stunning Amaryll, who is playing her own dangerous game.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanford law professor Goldstein's cleverly plotted third thriller starring intellectual property specialist Michael Seeley (after 2008's A Patent Lie) finds Seeley back at Boone, Bancroft, & Meserve, the New York City law firm he was once banished from, despite his being a partner. A potential conflict of interest arises after elderly Cuban musician Hector Reynoso seeks Seeley's help in retrieving the property rights to music he and friends wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, which have been sold to several publishers, some of which the law firm represents. A client unable to afford the usual hefty fees and the political sensitivity of American-Cuban relations force Seeley to lobby his executive committee before getting the green light to pursue the matter. Seeley ends up in Havana, where the discovery of a corpse complicates the case. Goldstein has no peer in making the dry subject matter of his professional expertise both accessible and engrossing.