Set in the remote town of Angustias, Puerto Rico, where the local police are derogatorily nicknamed gandules
(greenbeans) by their metropolitan peers, Torres's follow-up to last year's series debut provides more fast-paced, nonstop action. Sheriff Luis Gonzalo faces the murder case of his career. Habituated to the routine assignments of provincial life, Gonzalo has always wished for something more exciting, more demanding. And now that a close friend, the young abused mother of a newborn, is brutally stabbed to death in her house, his yearning has unfortunately been realized. What begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case becomes intensely complicated. Gonzalo and his deputies comb the increasing number of crime scenes for evidence to indict first one, then another and ultimately many more evil perpetrators. The novel, however, sometimes moves almost too quickly, and the sheriff's ability to ferret out the truth from the mass of tenuous and nebulous threads linking it all together appears farfetched. The tangled crime web unravels almost seamlessly in the duration of less than a day's work. Still, Torres's portrait of a most eclectic group of Puerto Ricans should particularly satisfy those readers interested in a culture that hitherto hasn't received much attention in mystery fiction. (May)
