The Novel Detective
A Detective Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jul 14, 2026
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A twisty, genre-bending metafictional mystery set in Cuba past and present about a writer returning to her long-lost hometown to seek the buried truth about two suspicious deaths at her Havana high school, perfect for fans of Chanel Cleeton and Jean Hanff Korelitz
2020: Teresa, a Cuban-born mystery writer now living in America, gets an unexpected call from her childhood best friend, Estrella, inviting her to Havana. Estrella is determined to get answers about a case that has haunted them both for decades: the purported dual suicides of a teacher and student at their high school. Though Teresa doesn’t quite understand why Estrella is taking the story so personally, she’s along for the ride—as she always wanted to write a novel about this case.
1980: Fourteen-year-old Teresita, bespectacled, awkward and mystery novel–obsessed, is “nosy, but not a tattletale.” She knows who’s been skimming off the top of the amphetamine stash in her mother’s pharmacy, which teacher keeps cyanide in his cabinet at school and that their classmate Yoyi is sleeping with their English teacher. Over the course of one fateful day, Teresita gets closer than ever to learning the “Truth of Life”—her catchall term for the intricacies of adult existence—even if it means coming face to face with death.
Drawing upon the tradition of Latin American magical realism and directly inspired by the author’s own childhood in Cuba and adult life in the United States, this resonant tale is at once personal and universal, full of nostalgia, candor and danger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sly dual-timeline mystery from Dovalpage (Last Seen in Havana), 14-year-old Teresa, a shy devotee of detective fiction living in Cuba, is scarred by the apparent double suicide of her high school classmate, Yoyi, and Felipe, their heartthrob teacher. Chapters set in 1980 and leading up to the discovery of the pair's bodies alternate with those set forty years later, when Teresa is a mystery novelist living in the United States. She still carries the guilt of withholding key information from police during their investigation of the tragedy. Then Teresa receives an unexpected phone call from her old friend Estrella, who proposes that Teresa accompany her to Havana to reinvestigate Yoyi and Felipe's deaths, offering a chance for closure and possible inspiration for a new book. The old friends reunite and interview their former teachers, many of whom still feel scorned by Felipe, and they begin to realize their childhood memories are less reliable and more complicated than they once believed. With lovable characters, a gripping core mystery, and a vividly rendered setting, this bolsters Dovalpage's reputation as a reliable purveyor of quality crime fiction. Readers will be entertained.
