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HIT LIST: THE BEST OF LATINO MYSTERY
by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez, eds.
Arte Publico Press, March 2009
191 pages
$19.95
ISBN: 1558855432


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Arte Publico Press, based at the University of Houston, describes itself as a David to mainstream publishing's Goliath. It has a distinguished history of promoting and preserving Latino culture. With this anthology, they have collected a gallery of crime fiction, gathering together work by Mario Acevedo, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Manuel Ramos, Steven Torres, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and other writers whose roots are anchored in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, New York, Texas, L.A., and the Southwest. This venture into the dark side has, like most anthologies, mixed results, with some of the most interesting efforts coming from the less well-known authors.

Opening with a very short story by Mario Acevedo (one that has his humor if not his usual paranormal elements) the collection moves on to an unusual story by Lucha Corpi, the first Chicana mystery writer. It's told from the point of view of a bullet fired into a woman's head; as the bullet passes through her brain we pick up random signals from her life. Manuel Ramos has fun with the famously missing "Skull of Pancho Villa." Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's "The Right Profile" is less successful – a prosaic, phoned-in effort from possibly the most commercially successful of the writers represented. Alicia Gaspar de Alba contributes "Shortcut to the Moon," about a young woman who travels to Mexico with a friend who disappears; in trying to find him, she loses herself for a while, but tells her story in an unforgettable voice.

In "Los Simpaticos" by Carlos Hernandez the narrator, the producer of a reality television show that dupes unsuspecting members of the public into hiring a hitman and capturing it on camera, says "Latinos don't like mysteries. The Brits, they're a mystery-crazy people. Americans too, if to a lesser degree. But us? All that confusion and ambiguity at the beginning, all those subtle clues to make you feel stupid at the end . . . To hell with mystery. Real life is too full of them." This collection demonstrates that "mystery" is too simple a word to contain such a variety of styles and narrative strategies and that Latinos are not a singular group, but a constellation of peoples separated by two common languages. It is a variegated collection of jokes, tragedies, moments of poetry, more jokes, the predictable and unpredictable, and here and there vivid glimpses of real life.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, August 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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