Havana Requiem by Paul Goldstein

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Synopsis

A richly plotted legal chessboard of a thriller that pits the litigator Michael Seeley against Cuba’s security police, the U.S. State Department, his firm’s own partners, and a closetful of skeletonsFueled by alcohol, legal brilliance, and heedless risk-taking, Michael Seeley once oversaw his law firm’s most successful litigation practice. Until it all fell apart. Booze, hubris, and overreach cost him his wife, his job, and likely the life of his last client,... more

A richly plotted legal chessboard of a thriller that pits the litigator Michael Seeley against Cuba’s security police, the U.S. State Department, his firm’s own partners, and a closetful of skeletonsFueled by alcohol, legal brilliance, and heedless risk-taking, Michael Seeley once oversaw his law firm’s most successful litigation practice. Until it all fell apart. Booze, hubris, and overreach cost him his wife, his job, and likely the life of his last client, a Chinese dissident journalist. After two years sober and practicing small-town law in upstate New York, Seeley has earned back most of what he lost: the partnership in his old Manhattan law firm, if not his corner office; the wary respect of most of his colleagues; the lucrative clients—but not the gin-sharpened passions. Then the aging and renowned Cuban musician Hector Reynoso enters his office with a simple request: help him and six other composers who defined Cuba’s musical golden age of the 1940s and 1950s—the music that made the Buena Vista Social Club internationally famous—reclaim copyright to their work. When Reynoso goes missing only to turn up dead, Seeley’s reluctant promise to help draws him deeper and deeper into the violent underbelly of Havana and a decades-long conspiracy that runs from the partners in his firm to the U.S. State Department to Cuba’s security police, which is willing to do anything to suppress the truth. And in the heat of Havana, Seeley will lose himself to his worst and best passions as his pursuit of justice narrows down to a desperate gambit to save the stunningly seductive Amaryll, who is playing her own dangerous game, even at the risk of his own life. less

About Paul Goldstein

Paul Goldstein is the Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford University and the author of two previous novels.