Southwesterly Wind

"One of the pleasures of reading Garcia-Roza derives from watching how he thwarts our narrative experiences. Throughout Southwesterly Wind, he shuffles and reshuffles a limited deck of secondary characters to assemble startling patterns. [A] wry and poetic voice."—Maureen Corrigan, Newsday

"A fortune-teller predicts that Gabriel, a thirtyish administrator, will commit murder before his next birthday. As the year progresses, Gabriel slowly unravels under the burden of the prediction, until he is driven to the office of Inspector Espinosa, where he confesses to the potential for crime. This third installment in the series (following December Heat) takes Espinosa into repressive, middle-class Rio de Janeiro, peopled with conservative parents and their secretive adult children. While billed as 'An Inspector Espinosa Mystery,' this is hardly a traditional police procedural but more an investigation into the nature of crime and its damaging effects on all that it touches. Fans of the existential Espinosa will delight in the interweaving of his personal life with the investigation. Garcia-Roza, fast becoming known as the master of Rio noir, delivers a taut novel in tight prose, well translated by Moser. For all mystery collections."—Library Journal

"The weather, perhaps a stand-in for fate, has a hand in the tentative outcome of Southwesterly Wind, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's third psychologically acute crime novel (after 2003's December Heat), translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser."—Publishers Weekly