Customer Reviews

Havana Twist: A Willa Jansson Mystery

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Written in the first person, at times "Havana Twist" reads more like an armchair travel book than a mystery novel. The Willa Jansson character is no ass-kicking feminist detective. Instead she leaves the hard work to her cop ex-boyfriend. He tries to solve the case while she worries about what to wear and if she'll get back together with him. When a man is shot dead beside her, she worries about a pinpoint powder burn on her thumb.

It paints the usual doom and gloom picture of Cuba, which I found to be extremely exaggerated (Are there really no dogs in Cuba??). I can only assume this was either for fictional impact or for political reasons; either way, this is not a book that anyone with a regard for accuracy will enjoy. There is certainly no attempt to balance or justify the constant depiction of Cuba as a sinister country, filled with paranoia and corruption, where you can trust no one. In fact the evil Chinese military and Hispanic villains lend the book racist undertones.

I found the style a bit self-conscious and culturally specific. Her cultural reference points were solidly two decades behind (an Andy Gibb look-alike??!!) and her new-age yuppie lifestyle does not contrast well with an attempt at a gritty third-world murder story.

To the book's credit, I did make it through to the end (although the plot was so tedious and cumbersome that I lost interest several times). It is constructed like the recollection of a bad dream, which makes the whole book lack believability. The book has its characters suddenly coming across deserted tunnels, meeting dark mysterious figures, suffering from mother anxiety, falling down shafts, running for airplanes.... Freud would have a field day. As the supporting characters are murdered around her, our heroine shows little remorse. I was waiting for a twist like the title suggested but it never came.

Havana Twist is one of those mysteries that drenches itself in local color. Unfortunately, Matera finds herself drenched in fatal, often hilarious mistakes.

The book reads strongly as if she's admirably decided to abide by U.S. travel regulations and never visited Cuba, choosing instead to research though books. Havana Twist contains a bewildering array of contradictory descriptions seemingly taken from different periods of recent Cuban history.

That might not matter except that she makes her descriptions of Cuba and her character's paranoia in the atmosphere there central to the development of the plot.

She describes the action as occurring perhaps a decade after the start of Castro's final hour; a period that started in about 1988-89, putting the book firmly in the present.

Astonishingly, laughably, she describes Cubans fleeing from tourists. Since I started (legally) visiting Cuba in about 1992, tourists have been swarmed by Cubans.

She depicts Chinese soldiers lurking everywhere. In about 18 trips over the past few years, I've never heard that, nor have I heard dissidents or diplomats mention such a thing.

She portrays a Cuba of empty, darkened streets, bereft of gasoline. That would have been true in about 1992-94. But in the past few years, anybody has been able to buy gasoline, the streets are even sometimes clogged, and power outages have sharply dimished.

She has Willa Jansson, who must be a pitiful attorney, think that by paying a hotel in Mexican pesos she is avoiding U.S. spending restrictions. She might check Treasury on that.

She seems to think the plastic bodied Moskvich is the principle form of automotive transport. Bizarre. There are a few metal-bodied version of that car around but the Russian Lada is vastly more prevalent and is probably now outnumbered by Japanese cars, Fiats and Peugeots. I've never heard of anybody renting a Moskvich, as she has characters do. And did she ever see sparking lights on Cubana flights? The airline tends to use modern planes chartered from European companies.

She has American journalists unable to get visas. Mainstream U.S. reporters have visited routinely, on cuban granted journalists visas, for many years now. Not everybody can get in, but the wire agencies she describes surely can. Check for havana datelines in databases.

By the way, how did Jansson's boyfriend carry a gun through U.S. and Mexican airport searches?

I've been flying out of Mexico for years and haven't noticed any charred Cubana planes lately.

There are more than 1 million tourists -- the largest number from Canada and many from the United States -- visiting each year. Jansson's fear of standing out as a tourist -- in HAVANA? -- is hilarous.

I could go on, and on, and on.

If she's going to use local paranoia and atmosphere as plot elements, they ought to seem credible.

"A. Reader"'s comments, and those of some others here, have made me want to read some of Lia Matera's other books. Surely they must be better than Havana Twist, whose writing is pedestrian at best (the description of the Havana waterfront and other landmarks I'm familiar with are spectacularly leaden and dull, and the characterization was unrealistic at best: what a bunch of bozos, legally speaking, her protagonists were), to inspire such unthinking loyalty.

While Mr. or Ms. "Reader" assures us she or he knows Cuba by drifting away from the tourist zones and can vouch for Matera (despite the efforts of sinister taxi drivers), I've visited Cuba about 20 times over the past seven years and have spent more time with open and avowed dissidents than "A. Reader" has spent altogether in Cuba. The statements referring to me by name, impugning my motives on easily provable false grounds, and posted anonymously, might be considered libelous in some contexts, if anybody was infantile enough to give them credence.

My failure to describe Matera's undescriptive description of Mexico City -- and its laws -- where I've lived for a decade -- was due to my intent not to bore potential readers.

I did very much like Martin Cruz Smith's Cuba-based mystery -- which was no more favorable to Cuba, and somewhat outdated, but vastly better written -- and recommend that anybody purchase it from Amazon.

Lia Matera's lawyer-sleuth, Willa Jansson, is one of my favorite characters in contemporary fiction because she's intelligent, has a unique moral center, and can be counted on to offer the clever aside that puts everything in perspective. And in HAVANA TWIST, she finds herself in a situation that shows off all her best qualities. I've read every one of Matera's books and love them all. An adventure with Willa Jansson always opens the world for me and introduces me to situations or places or ways of thinking that I hadn't known about before. Matera's a brilliant writer who can paint a culture like Castro's sad and much-diminished Cuba so vividly I can see the ruined houses, the streets and markets, the workers who toil there. When Willa's socialist-activist mother fails to return from a trip to that island, Willa follows every shred of a clue and finds herself confronted with increasingly hostile reactions from local officials. Brave but not foolish, she doesn't give up her search, even after she's expelled from the country. I was engrossed in this book I didn't notice that afternoon had turned to evening while I was following Willa down twisty streets, across dusty roads, and into the heart of a story that compelled me to keep reading. I highly recommend this entertaining and thoughtful book from an intelligent and clever writer.

This book is a poorly plotted, poorly characterized political screed. Lia Matera seems far more intent on trashing Cuba than she does on writing a novel. There is page after page of political venom that doesn't even sound very accurate. The character and her "quaint" mother are supposed to be "lefties" but the novel reads like a right wing puff piece. The plot had a deus ex machina ending and a not very interesting one at that. Too bad she didn't spend more time on the plotting and characterization. It was hard to get interested in either.

Willa Jansson is back in a mystery that is Lia Matera's best since 'Prior Convictions'. Havana Twist had me on the edge of my seat. Willa's mother, the original bleeding heart for socialism, disappears while on a tour of Cuba. Willa tries to retrace her footsteps and turns up a few clues that seem promising, but seem to lead no where. Months go by, and nothing pans out, until a Willa's former (much former!) love interest, Don Surgelato, SFPD lieutenant of homicide (and once on the receiving end of one of Willa's mother's very vocal, very public diatribes) picks up a tiny clue. The case escalates, Willa and Don eventually travel back to Cuba, only to return empty-handed. Fans of Matera's Willa Jansson series will love this quick-paced, dramatic story set against the backdrop of socialist Cuba. Like all of Matera's books, the novel is rich with political and social flavors, but without the world-weary cynicism of Matera's yuppie lawyer Laura DiPalma. Willa Jansson manages to maintain an innocent idealism, a belief in happy endings, even when all the evidence would indicate the ending has already come. Highly recommended, and if you've never read any of Matera's books, this is a great one to start with.

Most daughters would be angry at their mothers for nagging them about getting married or finding a better job, but not Willa Jansson. She would welcome such demands instead of being accused of selling out to the establishment by becoming a lawyer. June Jansson is to the left of Karl Marx. She is an activist who has been arrested so many times her family has lost count.

When June and thirteen other women, working for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, protest overseas, a humdrum Willa acts nonchalant. However, Willa becomes very concerned when her mother fails to return to the states with her companions.

Willa flies to Cuba (via Mexico City) to find her mother, but there is no trace of June anywhere. The two reporters who promised to help her have also disappeared. Willa continues to poke her nose into places where she is definitely persona non grata until she is escorted out of the country by the Castro government. Six months pass until information finally surfaces about June. Willa and a friend risk their lives by entering Cuba in an effort to rescue her mother.

HAVANA TWIST truly lives up to its name. The novel has so many plot twists and countless misdirections, most readers will not figure out what is going on even though all the clues are out in the open for all to see. Lia Matera brilliantly makes the clues seem like trivial tidbits rather than vital information. The examination of the socio-political situation in Cuba and the American policy towards that island country makes for authenticity and great reading. Ms. Matera demonstrates that she is an ingenious storyteller who can combine a first rate mystery with a political thriller into an entertaining package.

Harriet Klausner

Thirty-something, Santa Cruz lawyer/sleuth Willa Jansson's lefty mother, June, who still lives in the radical '60s, went to Cuba with a group of senior peaceniks and failed to return with the rest of the group and nobody knows what happened to her

Able to barely get by in Spanish, she goes to Cuba via Mexico, where she picks up Pesos to spend so she can get around the prohibition of spending U.S. Dollars, which the U.S. calls trading with the enemy.

In Cuba she meets up with a couple Americans, who seem like spy types, but claim to be reporters, and then they disappear. She continues looking as discretely as possible, making friends with a local street urchin, enemies with a Chinese soldier and she finds herself at odds with different departments of the Cuban Police and she eventually gets tossed out of the country.

Six months go by before some information finally comes to light about her mother, so she goes back with San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant Don Surgelato, an old flame she'd like to get together with again.

Now Willa has to stay a jump ahead of both the Cuban and American governments and a ruthless killer as she desperately hunts for her mother in this high-stakes, nail-biting, heart-racing thriller. And what did happen to June? Ah, you'll have to read the book to find out.

maverick lawyer,willa jansson, travels to post-soviet cuba in search of her peacenik mother. more of a missing person detective story than legal fiction. insightful description of deprivation and surveillance in an aging dictatorship with developing ties to red china.

I am a big Lia Matera fan and have been reading her for years and this is the first time I have been disappointed in one of her books. The plot is so convoluted and implausible and the characters so poorly developed that I had a hard time remembering who was who and how they were connected. Had very little to do with law and nothing to do with her being a lawyer. Also, her mother is one of my favorite characters and she hardly appears at all in the book. Think she should stick to venues in and around the San Francisco Bay Area which she appears to really know about. I would suggest that you give this one a miss,