Who Killed Palomino Molero? A Novel

This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth. Who Killed Palomino Molero, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa's characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society.

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost writer. In 1995 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many other works include The Storyteller, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, and most recent, The Feast of the Goat. He lives in London.

"Vargas Llosa's fiction is distinguished by his wit, his taste for irony and his disposition to engage the complexities of existence with an insight that distains glib moralizing or ideological rigor." —Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review