The Silence of the Rain

A Novel

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Benjamin Moser (translator)

Welcome to Rio de Janeiro. The beach is hot, the cops are crooked, the criminals are clever, and all our detective wants is to kiss a pretty lady and read a great book.

The story starts with a bang. Literally. A wealthy businessman carefully puts his office in order and walks to his car in the parking garage, briefcase in hand. He sits in the driver’s seat, calmly smokes a cigarette, and then shoots himself dead. But when the police arrive, the gun and briefcase are gone.

They immediately assume it’s a robbery gone wrong, but we know it’s not. The story becomes both a whodunnit and a howdunnit because throughout, we know things the cops don’t—but we don’t know everything until the very end.

At the helm of the police investigation is Inspector Espinosa of Rio’s First Precinct. He’s a lonely divorcé with a cozy apartment in a quiet corner of Copacabana Beach. Prone to waxing philosophical, he’s simultaneously world-weary and tender-hearted. ‘I don’t like October, he says, and I don’t like Sunday. October was starting on a Sunday. The only thing worse would be if Monday fell on a Sunday. The rain started up again, and the best thing to do was wait around until I could eat the second serving of pasta.’

Espinosa’s story is hung on the solid framework of a police procedural. As he methodically works his way through the suspects, he also becomes smitten with two women involved in the case: the dead guy’s glamorous, chilly widow and an effervescent gym owner who may or may not have something to do with the case.

The investigation takes Espinosa all over Rio, and there’s a very strong sense of the city’s different neighborhoods and its overall vibe: steamy, romantic, a little dangerous. The author was born in Rio and always lived in Copacabana himself. In an interview, he said, ‘Rio is seductive and sweet like a woman, but it can be as threatening as the moment that precedes a revolt.’ The detective he created feels the same way.

The knotty plot serves up twist after twist in a surprising and wholly believable way, and a revelation at about the fifty-percent mark is a lot of fun. Satisfying on both an emotional and a ‘figuring out the puzzle’ level, this mystery will keep you guessing until the end about what really happened that day in the parking garage.

Passing the corner of Rua dos Andradas, he looked to the left and momentarily lost his train of thought. The street was a corridor of little old houses from the middle of the last century, with tiny balconies of wrought iron, the sidewalks almost touching each other on the narrow street, at the end of which the hill of Santo Cristo was lit up by the sun. The beauty of the place was moving. — Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

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