Who Killed Palomino Molero? - by Mario Vargas Llosa (Paperback)

About the Book

Near an air-force base in Peru in the 1950s, a young airman is found tortured and murdered. The subsequent investigation makes an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery. In his ninth novel, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa turns to detective fiction yet still inserts his usual themes of guilt versus innocence and despair at the difficulty of being an honest man in a society based on corruption.

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the scene of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the commanding officer of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth.

Who Killed Palomino Molero, an entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery, takes up one of Vargas Llosa's characteristic themes: the despair at how hard it is to be an honest man in a corrupt society.

Review Quotes

"Vargas Llosa's fiction is distinguished by his wit, his taste for irony and his disposition to engage the complexities of existence with an insight that distains glib moralizing or ideological rigor." --Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.