Needle in a Haystack

July 26, 2010
As a member of a guerrilla movement that opposed Argentina's dictatorship, Mallo brings authenticity to his gripping debut, set in 1979 during military rule of that country. Early one morning, Superintendent Lascano of the Buenos Aires police looks into a report that two bodies have been dumped on a river bank. Instead, he finds three corpses—a young man and young woman, whose obliterated features are consistent with an army hit, and a man around 60, his face intact. The older victim turns out to be Holocaust survivor and money lender Elías Biterman, whose profession and faith provide no shortage of enemies. While Mallo reveals the killer's identity well before the end, the book's power derives from his depiction of an honest cop trying to do his job when even a judge observes, "With so many corpses everywhere, why worry about one more?" Martin Cruz Smith and Philip Kerr fans will be rewarded.

September 1, 2010

In 1979 Buenos Aires, under duress by a military dictatorship, Superintendent Lascono investigates the dumping of three bodies on the side of a road. Two of the corpses show evidence of an army hit, but the third is identified as a Holocaust survivor and money lender. VERDICT Written by a former member of the anti-junta guerilla movement, this bleak crime novel depicts an oppressed country where depression rules everyday life. For readers who like their international mysteries very dark.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2010
Buenos Aires police detective Lascano, inconsolable over the death of his beloved wife, immerses himself in his work; and perhaps this combination of all-consuming work and grief allows him to function, if numbly, in a city and country at war with itself. It is 1979, and the military junta in Argentina is torturing, murdering, and disappearing anyone it sees as dissident. Nightly machine-gun fire, hyperinflation, police corruption, and anti-Semitism are facts of everyday life, as Lascano begins to investigate a seemingly routine murder. At the same time, he meets a young dissident, Eva, whose resemblance to his late wife is eerie, and he shelters her in his home. Soon Lascano, Eva, and Lascanos only friend, a forensic pathologist, are targets of the brutal regime. Journalist and playwright Mallo, himself once pursued by the junta, has written a polemical stunner. Opponents of the junta also used violence. They get a pass from Mallo, but the sense of brutal totalitarian oppression and fear in Buenos Aires under the generals is palpable and utterly compelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)