Tango for a Torturer

Book excerpt: Aldo Bianchi, an Argentine former revolutionary living in Italy, travels to Havana where he meets the beautiful Bini, a graduate student working the hotels with great wit and panache. Bianchi soon discovers via his liaison with Bini that his nemesis, the Uruguayan military torturer Alberto Ríos, is living under a false identity in Cuba. Putting his tropical holiday on hold, Bianchi goes on the hunt for his sadistic enemy.Daniel Chavarría portrays the sensuousness and skullduggery of contemporary Havana, a city that offers erotic thrills to pleasure-seeking tourists even as it hides villains in its humid embrace. While Ríos thrives on bribery and corruption, Bianchi is driven by a desire to see justice done. Tango for a Torturer is a political thriller in which bawdy humour coexists alarmingly with chilling evocations of the evils wrought by military dictatorships in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.