Spotlight: Last Seen in Havana by Teresa Dovalpage
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A Havana Mystery Book 4
Genre: Mystery
A Cuban American woman searches for her long-lost mother and fights to restore a beautiful but crumbling Art Deco home in the heart of Havana in this moving, immersive new mystery, perfect for fans of Of Women and Salt.
Newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba in 2019 to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Mercedes’s life has been shaped by loss, beginning with the mysterious unsolved disappearance of her mother when Mercedes was a little girl. Returning to Cuba revives Mercedes’s hopes of finding her mother as she attempts to piece together the few scraps of information she has. Could her mother still be alive?
Thirty-three years earlier, in 1986, an American college student with endless political optimism falls deliriously in love with a handsome Cuban soldier while on a spontaneous visit to the island. She decides to stay permanently, but soon discovers that nothing is as it seems in
Havana.
The two women’s stories proceed in parallel as Mercedes gets closer to the truth about her mother, uncovering shocking family secrets in the process . . .
Excerpt
The Ashen Hour
At the ashen hour, that peculiar time of the day when night hasn’t fallen yet but you can’t see the edge of things, when the whole world seems to have gone underwater, my mother sometimes came to me. It wasn’t a dream, for I kept my eyes open the whole time, nor a childhood fantasy. It was a betwixt and between state, a rip in the fabric of reality, the glimpse of a mirage.
I remember one evening when the house felt quieter and emptier than usual. The blue glare of the television was the only light in the living room. I tiptoed outside and sat in the backyard under a mango tree while Mamina, my grandmother, busied herself in the kitchen. She was making congrí—black beans and rice, cooked together, with cumin and tiny pieces of bacon. I smelled fried chicken too (fried in lard, of course!) and my mouth watered.
I was getting hungry but soon forgot about the food. My mother approached quietly, her feet not quite touching the gravel path. I looked up and knew instantly that it was her, though I could not remember her face.
“¡Mamá!”
She knelt by my side and caressed my hair. A smell of roses engulfed me. I waited for her to explain those years of absence, to apologize and say that she loved me. But Mamina’s voice always broke the spell.
“Merceditas, where are you?”
My mother never came. The ghost of my nine-year-old self stayed under the tree, waiting for her.
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About the Author
Writer, translator and college professor, Teresa Dovalpage is a Cuban transplant firmly rooted in New Mexico. She is the author of twelve novels, among them the Havana Mystery series, three short story collections and four theater plays. She lives with her husband, one dog and too many barn cats. Her website is http://teredovalpage.com
