Blog tour: Last Seen In Havana

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Welcome to the blog tour for Last Seen In Havana by Teresa Dovalpage!

More about the book…

A Cuban American woman searches for her long-lost mother and fights to restore a beautiful but crumbling Art Deco home in the heart of Havana in this moving, immersive new mystery, perfect for fans of Of Women and Salt.

In 2019, newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Mercedes’s life has been shaped by loss, beginning with the mysterious unsolved disappearance of her mother when Mercedes was a little girl. Returning to Cuba revives Mercedes’s hopes of finding her mother as she attempts to piece together the few scraps of information she has. Could her mother still be alive?

33 years earlier, an American college student with endless political optimism falls deliriously in love with a handsome Cuban soldier while on a spontaneous visit to the island. She decides to stay permanently, but soon discovers that nothing is as it seems in Havana.

The two women’s stories proceed in parallel as Mercedes gets closer to discovering the truth about her mother, uncovering shocking family secrets in the process…

More about the author…

Writer, translator and college professor, Teresa Dovalpage is a Cuban transplant firmly rooted in New Mexico. She is the author of twelve novels, among them the Havana Mystery series, three short story collections and four theatre plays. She lives with her husband, one dog and too many barn cats.

My impressions…

A gorgeous book – inside and out. Every time I opened this book, I was immediately transported to a world I’ve never visited but that felt incredibly real thanks to the author’s evocative storytelling. I experienced Cuba through the eyes of a young American woman in the 1980s, and then again through the eyes of her Cuban American daughter in the present day. Different times, different backgrounds, same desire to belong.

Mercedes is looking for answers about her mother, who disappeared when she was a child. Did she leave her behind because she didn’t love her? Was she made to leave – or worse – because she was American and became caught up in a political situation that was bigger than her? Aided by family, friends and a good dose of bad weather, she might just discover the truth.

Three words to describe it. Captivating. Evocative. Melancholic.

Do I like the cover? Yes, it makes me want to jump on a plane and travel.

Have I read any other books by the same author? No, but I now want to read her other books set in Havana… and all the others, of course!

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