Looking for a mystery set in a place you likely have never been? That’s what Teresa Dovalpage gives readers in her new book, The Novel Detective, when she takes readers to her native Cuba — in pre-Covid 2020 and 40 years earlier when an alleged double suicide involving a teacher and student took place at a school. Full disclosure: Dovalpage is the friend who inspired me to write mysteries because she writes hers so well.
In The Novel Detective, Dovalpage created two books in one as well as two versions of the main character. Instead of relying on flashbacks, she cleverly rotates chapters between the two times throughout the novel.
So we meet the adult Teresa, who now lives in New Mexico where she is a mystery writer. She is contacted by a childhood friend, Estrella, who emigrated to Miami, to return home to solve a mystery that haunts them both still. The teacher appeared to have jumped from a window at the school while the female student, with whom he was having an affair, was found poisoned in another room. But is that what really happened?
Then there is 14-year-old Teresita, a shy girl growing up in heavily communistic Cuba. A fan of fictional detectives like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, she keenly observes what the people at her school are doing, including an inappropriate relationship between the aforementioned teacher and student.
Now an adult, Teresa relies on her skills as a mystery writer to interview people connected to this case. Her return to Cuba is also an opportunity to experience how much the country has changed since 1980.
In this excerpt, Teresa reflects on her family’s decision to leave Cuba. “I tried to imagine what my life would have been like if my family had stayed in Cuba. I would have gone to college, for sure, and majored in literature or perhaps English, since I already knew a little. Would I have managed to become a writer? And if I had, what kind of books would I have written? Crime novels glorifying State Security? Or I could have been a detective, like in my teenage dreams. Lieutenant Teresita? A real detective, not an amateur.”
Authors often take what they know and have their way with it. That’s the case with Dovalpage, who relies on her experiences growing up in Cuba and then living as an adult in the U.S. Besides creating a mystery that a reader would want to solve along with her, she gives us authentic views of Cuba.
The Novel Detective by Teresa Dovalpage, which has a July 14 release by Soho Press, is available in hard cover, Kindle and audiobook. Here’s the link on Amazon.