Product Review

Padura Fuentes-one of Cuba's best-known and most widely acclaimed writers-has written a first-rate detective story set against the backdrop of Hemingway's Cuba. Part fascinating examination of Hemingway the man in his trying final years and part nifty postmodern procedural, Adiós Hemingway will engross Hemingway fans while keeping them in suspense until the final pages. When the skeletal remains of a man brought down by two buckshots forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, ex-cop Mario Conte reluctantly accepts a reinstatement to investigate. As the truth of the night of October 3, 1958, slowly reveals itself, Conte must come to terms with his idealistic memory of Papa Hemingway on Cuba's sun-drenched docks from when he was a child tagging along with his grandfather. Padura Fuentes weaves Conte's world with that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier, a period marking the beginning of Hemingway's decline. In the heat-and-rum haze, the eras and personas begin to merge in this evocative, compelling novel.