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Product Description
Angustias, Puerto Rico, 1990.
Even a tropical paradise can have its little murders.
Luis Gonzalo, sheriff of the small town of Angustias in Puerto Rico’s central mountains, knows all there is to know about the people he has worked to protect for more than two decades. He knows that Elena Maldonado was beaten as a child. He knows that she was beaten as a wife. But when she winds up dead on the same day that she brings her newborn home from the hospital, he doesn’t know who has killed her.
Elena’s drunken husband seems like the obvious culprit, but after a grisly attack in front of the Angustias police station, potential suspects come out of the woodwork and multiply. The case is further complicated when someone breaks into the crime scene, but no one can figure out what, if anything, was taken.
Before the case is solved, Gonzalo and his deputies will be hard pressed to be certain that justice has been served, and the town of Angustias will be changed forever. A man will die in Gonzalo’s arms, a trusted friend will be brutalized, and a fortune worth millions will change hands. Throughout all the turmoil, Gonzalo will keep two special people in mind: Elena Maldonado, the young woman whose life of constant abuse the sheriff had been unable to salvage, and her child, so soon left motherless.
Amazon.com Review
Angustias is such an insignificant Puerto Rican hill town, that its police station contains only two cells--not nearly enough to hold all of the miscreants collected by Sheriff Luis Gonzalo in Steven Torres's second police procedural, Death in Precinct Puerto Rico. The troubles begin with a bar brawl, but soon escalate into homicide. Elena Maldonado has endured repeated abuse--first by her father, then by her husband, Marcos ("It was said that she had the spirit to fight back for a while but never enough body to hurt the men who attacked her"). However, the birth of her first child has finally convinced Elena to seek a divorce. When she's subsequently stabbed to death in her kitchen, and Marcos is found drunk, clutching a bloody knife, the case seems open and shut. Yet complications soon arise. The decedent allegedly had a boyfriend--perhaps the same mystery man who attacked an elderly cop left to guard the crime scene. Marcos has his own secrets: Elena's baby may not also be his; nor is Marcos the impecunious layabout his neighbors presume. And even as Gonzalo untangles the circumstances of this slaying, more blood is shed when Elena's father attacks Marcos with an ax, then turns the blade on his own throat.
Torres' predilection for action plotting, which hurt the credibility of his previous Gonzalo novel, Precinct Puerto Rico: Book One, is somewhat better balanced here with character development. Suspects in the Maldonado case are more fully sketched than most of Angustias's cops, but none receives as much attention as Gonzalo. Boasting 26 years as sheriff, and with a wife who's now hoping somehow to adopt Elena's orphaned boy, he must mete out justice without alienating his often eccentric countryfolk. The sheriff is a bit too clever in the end at sorting out the greed and antipathy behind Elena's demise. Still, it's his warmth and imperfections that make this otherwise standard procedural engaging. --J. Kingston Pierce
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