Books in series
#1
Havana Blue
1991
Lieutenant Mario Conde is suffering from a terrible New Year’s Eve hangover. Though it’s the middle of a weekend, he is asked to urgently investigate the mysterious disappearance of Rafael Morin, a high-level business manager in the Cuban nomenklatura. Conde remembered Morin from their student days: good-looking, brilliant, a “reliable comrade’’ who always got what he wanted, including Tamara, the girl Conde was after.
But Rafael Morin’s exemplary rise from a poor barrio and picture-perfect life hides more than one suspicious episode worthy of investigation. While pursuing the case in a decaying but adored Havana, Conde confronts his lost love for Tamara and the dreams and illusions of his generation.
#2
Havana Gold
1991
Twenty-four-year-old Lissette Delgado was beaten, raped, and then strangled with a towel. Marijuana is found in her apartment and her wardrobe is suspiciously beyond the means of a high school teacher. Lieutenant Conde is pressured by “the highest authority” to conclude this investigation quickly when chance leads him into the arms of a beautiful redhead, a saxophone player who shares his love for jazz and fighting fish.
#3
Havana Red
1997
A young transvestite in a beautiful red dress is found strangled in a Havana park. Conde’s investigation into a violent murder exposes a stifling, corrupt society, a Cuban reality where nothing is what it seems. A dark and fascinating world of men and women born in the revolution who live without dreaming of exile and seek their identity in the midst of disaster.
#4
Havana Black
A Lieutenant Mario Conde Mystery
1998
The brutally mutilated body of Miguel Forcade is discovered washed up on a Havana beach. Head smashed in by a baseball bat, genitals cut off by a dull knife. Forcade was once responsible for the confiscation of art works from the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution. Had he really returned from exile just to visit his ailing father?
#5
Adiós, Hemingway
2001
When the skeletal remains of a man brought down by shotgun surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer, drinker, and ex-cop Mario Conte reluctantly accepts a reinstatement to investigate the forty-year-old crime. As the truth of the night of October 3, 1958, slowly reveals itself, Conte must come to terms with his idealistic memory of Papa Hemingway on Cuba's sun-drenched docks, back when Conde was a child tagging along with his grandfather." Padura Fuentes weaves Conte's world with that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier, a period marking the beginning of Hemingway's decline. In the heat-and-rum haze, the eras and personas begin to merge.
#6
Havana Fever
2003
Mario Conde has retired from the police force and makes a living trading in antique books. Havana is now flooded with dollars, populated by pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other hunters of the night. In the book collection of a rich Cuban who fled after the fall of Batista, Conde discovers an article about Violeta del Rio, a beautiful bolero singer of the 1950s who disappeared mysteriously. A murder soon follows. This is a crime story set in today’s darker Cuba, but it is also an evocation of the Havana of Batista, the city of a hundred night clubs where the paths of Marlon Brando and Meyer Lansky crossed.
#7
La cola de la serpiente
2011
Mario Conde investigates a murder in the Barrio Chino, the rundown Chinatown of Havana. Not his usual beat, but when Conde was asked to take the case by his colleague, the sultry, perfectly proportioned Lieutenant Patricia Chion, a frequent object of his nightly fantasies, he couldn’t resist. The case proves to be unusual. Pedro Cuang, a lonely old man, is found hanging naked from a beam in the ceiling of his dingy room. One of his fingers has been amputated and a drawing of two arrows was engraved with a knife on his chest. Was this a ritual Santería killing or a just a sordid settling of accounts in a world of drug trafficking that began to infiltrate Cuban society in the 1980s? Soon Conde discovers unexpected connections, secret businesses and a history of misfortune, uprooting and loneliness that affected many immigrant families from China. As ever with Padura, the story is soaked in atmosphere: the drinking of rum in deliciously smoke-filled bars, the friendships, the food and beautiful women.
#8
Herejes
2013
A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author
In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear.
Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family’s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana.
In Heretics, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt’s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura’s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.
#9
La transparencia del tiempo
2018
From Leonardo Padura—whose crime novels featuring Detective Mario Conde form the basis of Netflix’s Four Seasons in Havana—The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history.
Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday. What does he have to show for his decades on the planet? A failing body, a slower mind, and a decrepit country, in which both the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution are being swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money.
Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de
Regla—a black Madonna. This sets Conde on a quest that spans twenty-first century Havana as well as the distant past, as he delves as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue.
Through vignettes from the life of a Catalan peasant named Antoni Barral, who appears throughout history in different guises—as a shepherd during the Spanish Civil War, as vassal to a feudal lord—we trace the Madonna to present-day Cuba. With Barral serving as Conde’s alter ego, unstuck in time, and Conde serving as the author’s, we are treated to a panorama of history, and reminded of the impossibility of ever remaining on its sidelines, no matter how obscure we may think our places in the action.
Equal parts The Name of the Rose and The Maltese Falcon, The Transparency of Time cements Leonardo Padura’s position as the preeminent literary crime writer of our time.
#10
Personas decentes
2022
La Habana, 2016. Un acontecimiento histórico sacude Cuba: la visita de Barack Obama en lo que se ha llamado el «Deshielo cubano» —la primera visita oficial de un presidente estadounidense desde 1928—, acompañada de eventos como un concierto de los Rolling Stones y un desfile de Chanel, ponen patas arriba el ritmo de la isla. Por eso, cuando un exdirigente del Gobierno cubano aparece asesinado en su apartamento, la policía, desbordada por la visita presidencial, recurre a Mario Conde para que eche una mano en la investigación. Conde descubrirá que el muerto tenía muchos enemigos, pues en el pasado había ejercido de censor para que los artistas no se desviaran de las consignas de la Revolución, y que había sido un hombre déspota y cruel que había acabado con la carrera de muchos artistas que no habían querido plegarse a sus extorsiones. Cuando unos días después se encuentra un segundo cadáver asesinado con el mismo método, Conde deberá descubrir si las dos muertes están relacionadas y qué hay detrás de estos asesinatos.
A esa trama, se suma una historia que escribe el protagonista, situada un siglo antes, cuando La Habana era la Niza del Caribe y se vivía pensando en el cambio inminente que produciría el cometa Halley. Un caso de asesinato de dos mujeres en La Habana Vieja destapa la lucha abierta entre un hombre poderoso, Alberto Yarini, refinado y de buena familia, capo de los negocios de juego y de prostitución, y su rival Lotot, francés, que le disputa la preeminencia. El desarrollo de esos hechos históricos tendrá conexión con la historia del presente de un modo que ni el propio Mario Conde sospecha.
Author
Leonardo Padura
Author · 21 books
Leonardo Padura Fuentes (born 1955) is a Cuban novelist and journalist. As of 2007, he is one of Cuba's best known writers internationally. In English and some other languages, he is often referred to by the shorter form of his name, Leonardo Padura. He has written movie scripts, two books of short stories and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages. In 2012, Fuentes was awarded the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and the most important award of its kind. Leonardo Padura nasceu em Havana, em 1955. Licenciado em Filologia, trabalhou como guionista, jornalista e crítico, tornando-se sobretudo conhecido pela série de romances policiais protagonizados pelo detetive Mario Conde, traduzidos para inúmeras línguas e vencedores de prestigiosos prémios literários, como o Prémio Café Gijón 1995, o Prémio Hammett em 1997, 1998 e 2005, o Prémio do Livro Insular 2000, em França, ou o Brigada 21 para o melhor romance do ano, além de vários prémios da crítica em Cuba e do Prémio Nacional de Romance em 1993. Sua tetralogia Las cuatro estaciones, com histórias do detetive Mario Conde, começou a ser publicada em inglês. Os livros são: Pasado perfecto ("Havana Blue", 2007), 1991 Vientos de cuaresma ("Havana Yellow", 2008)), 1994 Mascaras ("Havana Red", 2005), 1997 Paisaje de otoño ("Havana Black", 2006), 1998. Padura publicou também dois livros subseqüentes apresentando o detetive Conde: Adios Hemingway e La neblina del ayer Neste momento, Padura está a finalizar um romance em que os protagonistas são o revolucionário russo León Trotsky e o seu assassino, Ramón Mercader. Livros de Padura editados em português (Portugal, Edições ASA) Adeus, Hemingway Morte em Havana (Máscaras) A neblina do passado Paisagem de Outono O Romance da Minha Vida Um Passado Perfeito Ventos de Quaresma http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo...
