Customer Reviews

The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini

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Dobyns is an author I met first as a poet (Cemetery Nights); then I discover he wrote excellent novels and formula mysteries. This book is definately literature not formula mystery.

The story is set in a Latin American city during an uprising. A group of men who've known each other for years meet for a dinner party. The host's relationship with his housekeeper, the Senora Puccini of the title, is dominating and cruel. In the course of the evening his degradation of her becomes more and more cruel as more of the story behind the relationship becomes known - a story of passion, jealousy, love and fidelity. The final revelations are both surprising and believable.

This is an excellent book - a story told so well that you want to read it over and over - a story so disturbing that is forces you to consider man's cruelity to man.

For a book that covers the events of one single night (and some of the next day) this book doesn't drag at all. Sometimes when authors try to keep the entirety of a novel to one day or one night, it seems like they take forever at it. This is really a fine story, with great twists.

This is a very disturbing book, reveiling the darkness, and evil of the human animal. It is tragic in so many ways that one comes away with the feeling that humankind lives in a cesspool of selfishness, with no chance of redemption or any need for it. The world is as it is, violent and ugly. Pacheo, a surgeon and the central character, is as despicable and amoral character as there has ever been, but he bluntly makes no apologies for what he is or what he has done. He is the narcissistic sociopath extraordinaire, and as this book unravels we see that this surgeon, who publicly is respected, is actually very much more sinister. The story is gripping, and reaches a steadily rising crescendo until the last page. A book worth the read, but get ready for a good dose of human ugliness.