Havana Best Friends is a well-paced mystery thriller set in Havana. There is a plausible plot involving millions of dollars worth of diamonds hidden in an apartment when the owner had to flee the Communist revolution 40 years ago, the efforts of a couple of key people to find them, how they involve and engage the people living in the apartment, the cross-pattern of a psychopathic killer intent on getting a slice of the action (or rather all of the action), a couple of sympathetic police officers trying to solve a couple of murders that lead them, unwittingly, to the retrieval of the diamonds, and a tense, minute-by-minute account as the police start to close-in on the culprits. By this time, at the end of the book, the reader's sympathies are with the culprits. I will leave it to future readers to discover for themselves how it turns out.

Latour does a good job rendering modern day Havana and Cuban life, complete with the hardships and shortages, the "permanent divorce between reality and discourse" that leads to the cloak of cynicism that people must wear in order to survive. A quick and engaging read. (March/06)