The devil of the provinces

Cárdenas (Ornamental) spins a dizzying and beguiling yarn of a middle-aged man's return to his Colombian hometown after 15 years abroad. It's a crime story, but one without clear answers or culprits. Instead, the unnamed protagonist, a biologist-cum-teacher at a Catholic girls' school, considers his options and examines the mysteries of his past. During the narrator's absence, his brother was abducted and killed. The press speculated about his killer's identity and motive, but no explanation made sense to the biologist, who goes on living with the knowledge that his mother wished it were him who died instead. At the school where he works, he helps a student give birth to a baby with hair covering its face and horns on the back of its head. He waffles over whether to take a biochemistry job for a palm grower, then decides to quit the teaching gig but delays giving his notice, and has an elliptical dialogue with a devil-like man who calls himself the "knight of formaldehyde." Cárdenas describes the sweltering heat in beautifully strange terms (the sun "poured down on him like boiling lemonade"), adding to the sense of small-town oppression, where self-deprecating jokes are "a kind of determinist doctrine." South American fiction fans will love this. (May)

A biologist returns to his Colombian hometown after 15 years abroad and tumbles into a mystery in this metaphysical crime novel. Cárdenas' unnamed protagonist returns home to his mother licking his wounds. He's recently divorced, and his research funding has evaporated. He's taken a job, apparently the only one he can find, as a substitute teacher at an all-girls boarding school. His only friend is his pot dealer. But a chance encounter with an old acquaintance leads him to reconsider the unsolved murder of his brother, a closeted gay man with political aspirations. This is a detective novel of sorts, yet it's not a spoiler to say it won't end in a Scooby Doo--like reveal. There is a web, but it may not have a center. Was the narrator's brother killed by unscrupulous palm oil executives or a jealous lover? And does the murder have anything to do with the Knight of Faith, a church "for the true believers, with a parking lot for UFOs and everything"? Cárdenas generates queasy intrigue from something as strange as the birth of a devil child and as mundane as a text message that has been read but not replied to. He can find poetry in anything, like a flicked joint that becomes "the last leg of the smoking insect, a jot of almost-ash that died in the wet grass without putting up a fight, swathed in the song of a thousand frogs." This is Cárdenas' second novel to be translated into English, after Ornamental, which was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Award, and more translations are eagerly anticipated. Briskly paced, thoughtful, and truly weird: a whodunit that takes on the very idea of blame. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.