When the bones of a man murdered forty years earlier surface on the Havana estate of Ernest Hemingway, writer and ex-cop Mario Conde is called in to investigate. As he unearths the truth of the night of 3 October 1958, he is forced to come to terms with a very different side to his former literary hero. Padura Fuentes switches between Conde's world and that of Hemingway's Cuba four decades earlier; in the heat and rum haze, the two seem slowly to merge. In an extraordinary journey into the past and into the personality of one of the twentieth century s most enigmatic and powerful writers, a masterful and totally convincing portrait emerges, as well as a riveting mystery that will keep you in suspense until the very final pages.