Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery

Originally published in 1985, this intriguing first volume in Hinojosa’s acclaimed Klail City Death Trip series (Ask a Policeman, etc.) introduces homicide detective Rafe Buenrostro of the Belken County, Tex., police force as well as the five other members of the local homicide squad and some of their Mexican counterparts, like Capt. Lisandro Gómez Solís. In the fall of 1972, a crime wave sweeps Klail City, from a fatal domestic dispute and the strangled corpse behind the wheel of a big Buick in a cleared cotton field to an anonymous tip about bank irregularities and the brutal machine-gunning of three men in a restaurant. Buenrostro’s sometimes surprising literary references (e.g., to Maimonides, Goethe, Thurber) add spice. Hinojosa writes with great insight and gentle humor about the human condition and the sometimes cordial, sometimes prickly, relationships between the forces for public order on both sides of the border. (Nov.)