Last Seen in Havana
Teresa Dovalpage
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While fans of Teresa Dovalpage’s Havana Mystery will be richly rewarded by Last Seen in Havana, newcomers to the author’s oeuvre will deeply enjoy this introduction to the series. Similar to Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, the five Havana Mystery feature overlapping characters, but need not be read sequentially. Experiencing them in order, though, does preserve some suspense. Like many practitioners of the literary arts, Dovalpage continues to hone her craft with each book, and Last Seen in Havana, with its dual narratives, emerges as her strongest and most ambitious novel to date. As in her previous mysteries, the author focuses on developing nuanced characters in a clear-eyed, yet compassionate way, and through evocative description and details, Dovalpage transports readers to Havana in two different time periods: 2019 and 1986. Added to this, the disarmingly witty writing provides an apt vehicle for delivering sharp insights on power dynamics, especially as related to gender. Last Seen in Havana presents a pair of protagonists with separate story lines in alternating chapters, beginning with first-person narration from Mercedes Spivey, the main character in Death Under the Perseids. In 2019, Mercedes again travels to Cuba from the U.S., summoned this time to tend to her ailing paternal grandmother. Apart from concern over Mamina’s diminished physical and cognitive health, Mercedes’ trip to Havana is fraught by after-echoes from the mysterious disappearance of her mother thirty-three years ago, an inexplicable abandonment that has haunted Mercedes throughout her life. The novel’s second narrative strand filters through the third-person perspective of Sarah Lee Nelson, also known as Tania Rojas Pérez, a young American woman who falls in love while visiting Cuba in the mid-1980s. Unbeknownst to her family in San Diego, Sarah remains in Havana illegally with Joaquin, her inamorato, whom she marries. While Joaquin works as a military officer, Sarah struggles to maintain and keep clean the too-large villa that has been confiscated from wealthy owners and awarded to Joaquin for his service. As time passes, Sarah chafes under increasingly austere conditions that presaged the “Special Period” in Cuba, when perestroika compromised Soviet support to the island nation, triggering economic hardship. |
In alternating chapters, the narrative and temporal shifts—from Mercedes in 2019 to Sarah in 1986—are clearly signaled by excerpts from letters that Sarah writes to her closest friend Rob, her erstwhile traveling companion and the only person who knows of her whereabouts after she defected. The two narrative trajectories intersect, of course, in a profound way. Beyond this connection, they share the same setting—Havana—and many of the same characters, including Mamina and Sarah’s friend Dolores. They even have an antagonist in common: Villa Santa Marta, the outsized house where Sarah lived in the 1980s and in which Mercedes was raised by her paternal grandmother. By 2019, Villa Santa Marta has become the perilously decrepit place that Mamina still inhabits.
The house had always had a malevolent aura. It could have been the porthole window about the main entrance, like an evil eye glaring at those who approached, or the dirty gray stucco that had peeled off in many areas, or the ungroomed lawn with weeds as tall as a ten-year-old child.
Portrayed as a house plagued by spectral presence, Villa Santa Marta also symbolizes the troubled past—the decadent excesses that the Revolution sought to dismantle, as well as the shortsighted failure of the new order to preserve the historic home and to recognize that swapping ownership falls short of eradicating inequity.
Author Lucha Corpi asserts that the mystery genre offers opportunity to expose machinations of systems that “stack the deck against women,” along with the means to redress this imbalance of power, obtaining justice—if only poetic—for those who lack agency. Last Seen in Havana clearly supports this claim, as Mercedes and Sarah give voice to women damaged—directly and collaterally—by patriarchal dominance that engenders violence.
What ensues is a gripping mystery that captures the dynamics of people and place, a novel rife with emotional resonance. Teresa Dovalpage evokes tremendous empathy for her characters, however willfully blind and stubborn they may be. Merecedes’ sorrow over her abandonment feels keen and true, the sharpness of her grief palpable, decades after losing the mother she cannot remember. Sarah’s heartbreaking optimism and vulnerability mirror the magical thinking to which many young women subscribe when in love. Both are imperiled by the structural danger and seemingly supernatural wickedness of Villa Santa Marta—a house haunted by secrets, half-truths, and lies.
Teresa Dovalpage was born in Havana and now lives in Hobbs, where she is a professor at NMJC. She is the author of thirteen novels and three theater plays. Her most recent book is Last Seen in Havana, the fifth in the Havana Mystery series published by Soho Crime.
Last Seen in Havana (2024) is a publication by Soho Crime.
Author Lucha Corpi asserts that the mystery genre offers opportunity to expose machinations of systems that “stack the deck against women,” along with the means to redress this imbalance of power, obtaining justice—if only poetic—for those who lack agency. Last Seen in Havana clearly supports this claim, as Mercedes and Sarah give voice to women damaged—directly and collaterally—by patriarchal dominance that engenders violence.
What ensues is a gripping mystery that captures the dynamics of people and place, a novel rife with emotional resonance. Teresa Dovalpage evokes tremendous empathy for her characters, however willfully blind and stubborn they may be. Merecedes’ sorrow over her abandonment feels keen and true, the sharpness of her grief palpable, decades after losing the mother she cannot remember. Sarah’s heartbreaking optimism and vulnerability mirror the magical thinking to which many young women subscribe when in love. Both are imperiled by the structural danger and seemingly supernatural wickedness of Villa Santa Marta—a house haunted by secrets, half-truths, and lies.
Teresa Dovalpage was born in Havana and now lives in Hobbs, where she is a professor at NMJC. She is the author of thirteen novels and three theater plays. Her most recent book is Last Seen in Havana, the fifth in the Havana Mystery series published by Soho Crime.
Last Seen in Havana (2024) is a publication by Soho Crime.
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