Publication date: November 7, 2023

Summary

When her husband, Robert, surprises her with a trip to the Dominican Republic to visit her parents, Miriam is thrilled! She’s pregnant and soon won’t be able to travel from Miami by plane, so this may be her last chance to see them before the baby is born. However, when she arrives at the vacation complex in Punta Cana where her parents work as caretakers, something seems to be wrong. Things keep breaking unexpectedly and she knows how diligent her father is about maintenance. Just as her curiosity is aroused, her work takes her to Puerto Rico for the week where even more sinister things seem to be afoot. 

My Thoughts

This wasn’t really a traditional mystery where you have an established crime, a pool of suspects, and an amateur detective who goes around gathering clues. Instead, there is gentrification,  historical and colonial injustices, wealth disparities, and political ineptitude tangled altogether with shady police officers, bitcoin financiers, money laundering, dognapping, disappearing boyfriends, social justice movements, and rumors of deaths. The reader follows as she tries to interweave all of the disparate strands, but Mariam doesn’t know for certain if anything is really wrong or if she is just being overly sensitive. It made for a fascinating mystery and a fabulous read.

This was the third in the series and I will go back and read the first two. The fact that I was new to the series didn’t make a difference to following and enjoying the story.

What Else I Liked

• I loved the characters

• Miriam is an intelligent woman, a former professor of food anthropology, who loves to geek out over her specialty “Food of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean”. She is passionate about her work, devoted to her family, and an extremely loyal friend. Her compassion and observation skills help make her a great amateur detective. 

• Miriam also straddles so many different cultures. She is the American-born daughter of parents who fled Castro’s Cuba. Her parents hope to retire in the Dominican Republic because it is as close as they can come culturally to the home to which they will never return. She has a cousin who is a political activist in Puerto Rico and an aunt who sees all political activism as “liberal” and therefore communist. Meanwhile, her husband and his family are very white and her mother-in-law is xenophobic and racist. 

• This book made me so hungry! The descriptions of what she ate were mouth-watering. Fortunately, there are recipes in the back of the book. I was intrigued enough by the food that I finally bumped Diasporican by Illyana Maisonet to the top of my wishlist.

• This author paints very vivid images. At times it felt like I was reading an exciting travelogue. I feel like I could go to San Juan now and feel like I have already been there.

• There is a lot of humor in the book! Jorge had some great lines, but my moment favorite came from Miriam: “It’s a tent. I’m a mango tent” (You have to read it in context to get why it’s funny, but thinking about it still makes me giggle)

• I love books with well-rounded LGBTQ+ characters.

• There is a lot of Spanish in the book, which I think makes the dialogue flow very organically. The majority of it is either clearly explained soon after it is spoken or it can be figured out by context for those who don’t speak Spanish. 

My Rating 5/5

I received this book as a free eArc from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

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About the Author

RAQUEL V. REYES writes Latina protagonists. Her Cuban-American heritage, Miami, and Spanglish feature prominently in her work. Mango, Mambo, and Murder, the first in the Caribbean Kitchen Mystery series, won a LEFTY for Best Humorous Mystery. It was nominated for an Agatha Award and optioned for film. Raquel’s short stories appear in various anthologies, including The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022. 

Find her across social media platforms as @LatinaSleuths and on her website LatinaSleuths.com

(This bio is from her website rvreyes.com)