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The Killing of the Saints

In this first Cuban-American thriller, the genre is reinvigorated with a stunning, brutually authentic tale of commerce and witchcraft, crime and the law in Hispanic Los Angeles. A story of mysterious sin, love and redemption, “The Killing of the Saints” explores the hidden life of that great western metropolis and its strange, seductive alliances. Charlie Morell, a court-appointed private investigator, is compelled to take on the case of two Cuban “marielitos” — followers of the voodoo-like santería cult — accused of a particuarly vicious massacre in a downtwon jewelry store. But the ordinary thriller tradition is upended by the crucial role ethnic identity plays in this story. Charlie is himself Cuban, hiding the City of Angels away from his own guilty secrets — just another faceless detective. His investigation of the santería case forces him to confront his past, exposing the real reasons Charlie abandoned his exile family, his wife, child and a flourishing law practice in south Florida. Drawn to and helped by the lusty Cuban Lucinda, who has her own cloudy past, Charlie works hard, in spite of his instincts, to try to get his clients exonerated, precipitating a series of shocking surprises and a bloody climactic battle.

The language is brilliant and lush, the sex tropical, in this courtroom drama blazing with a realism seldom found in stories of the law. Here is a never-before-told tale by a new Cuban-American voice about a part of the country in the naked process of reinventing itself.

Praise

The New York Times
Notable Books of the Year 1991
Published: December 1, 1991
THE KILLING OF THE SAINTS. By Alex Abella. A strange and powerful first novel, narrated by a court investigator and written in an ornate style, about the Cuban-American subculture in Los Angeles.

The New York Times
September 29, 1991
Alex Abella’s strange and powerful first novel, THE KILLING OF THE SAINTS (Crown, $19), opens with a snarl but soon drops to one knee, pleading for understanding if not mercy. For the most part, this brutal narrative about the subculture of Cuban-Americans living in Los Angeles earns the horrified attention it clamors for. “Their case was a dog,” says Charlie Morell, the court investigator who narrates this hotheaded tale, when he reads in El Diario about two drugged-up Marielitos who went on a murderous rampage in a jewelry store. “They have no defense,” he taunts their lawyer. “They were there, they robbed the store, they killed the hostages. . . . No matter how you slice it, they’re going to get gas in Quentin.” When the court appoints him to their dog of a case, Charlie has to chew his own words. Mr. Abella’s ornate style takes getting used to, and so does the operatic hyperbole of the violence. Even the courtroom becomes a theater when Charlie’s mad-dog client Ramon de la Concepcion Armas Valdez presents his novel defense: the gods of his voodoo religious cult made him do it. “I’m beyond your right and wrong,” he informs the mesmerized jury. Charlie, who is also listening hard, submerges himself in this exotic case — the better to come to terms with his own ethnic identity, the ghosts of his own buried past. Like the reader, he surfaces from his new experiences with a painfully raw view of Latin Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly
Enriched by its splendid setting in the Cuban section of Los Angeles, this atmospheric thriller explores witchcraft and courtroom procedures. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Latin American magical realism makes further inroads into mainstream American fiction with this unusual courtroom thriller set in the milieu of the Los Angeles Cuban refugee community of practitioners of the Santeria cult. The book centers on the murder trial of two cult members who are charged with murdering six people in the course of robbing a jewelry store. The narrator, himself a Cuban with a tormented past, is appointed by the court as an investigator for one of the defendants. Rich in gritty local detail, exemplified by a wonderful series of graffiti that runs through the entire book, Abella’s book joins Madison Smartt Bell’s The Washington Square Ensemble ( LJ 2/15/83), among others, in the ranks of excellent novels exploring the refugee experience and the fringes of religiosity. A worthwhile purchase for general fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/91.
-David Dodd, Benicia P.L., Cal. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.