Tangled Web UK Review January 2003
Havana Best Friends by
Jose Latour
pbk out October 02
(HarperCollins)
at £10.99
To say this engrossing book is a diamond heist caper novel is to miss the
point. True, missing diamonds do figure in it, and the story in the end hangs on
whether the people involved will escape or not. But the essence of the story is the
lives of those enmeshed in the heist. Moreover, Cuba itself is a major player in the
novel.
It begins with a policeman observing a tall overweight tourist parking illegally
in the centre of Havana. He is distracted by two joggers passing by, one an attractive
woman. The story then veers off on a tangent, and we follow the joggers progress
instead of the tourist. Latour is never better than when he diverts the reader's
attention, and misleads. We forget the tall overweight man. He is to return with a
vengeance later, however. The joggers inveigle themselves into the faded glory of a
Cuban couple's apartment and we know something is afoot. We just don't know
what. The joggers Sean and Marina - Canadian tourists themselves - quickly worm
their way into the world of the Cubans - brother and sister, Elena and Pablo.
Their world is one of ancient domestic appliances, a lack of telephones, illegal
restaurants, and official government spies who observe their neighbours on behalf
of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. Elena is a good-hearted woman
with numerous lovers, working as a special-needs teacher. Pablo, her brother,
is a pornographer, whose life is terminated by the mysterious overweight man.
Their father is a former revolutionary hero jailed for murdering his philandering
second wife. And still we don't know what it's all about.
We are well into the book before we learn that Sean and Marina are not who
they seem. They have been employed by a blind Vietnam vet to recover the diamonds
hidden by his father, when he fled Cuba before the revolution. The overweight man
is a psychopathic ex-soldier incautiously employed by 'Sean', and who wants the
diamonds all for himself.
The final part of the mix is Captain Felix Trujillo, an incorruptible police
officer. He niggles away at the seemingly unrelated series of events, as much in the
dark as the reader is until well into the book. What we do know is that everyone's life
will be changed irrevocably by the unfolding events.
Latour, in a language not his own, manages to pull off a successfully tense
storyline, while still engrossing us with insights into the almost inconceivable
everyday world of ordinary people living in Communist Cuba.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
New Books by Jose Latour at Amazon.co.uk
Secondhand and Out of Print Books by Jose Latour at Alibris.com
