Blood Tango: A Mystery

by Annamaria Alfieri

It is the most dramatic and tumultuous period in Argentina's history. Colonel Juan Perón, who had been the most powerful and the most hated man in the country, has been forced out of power. Many people fear that his mistress, radio actress Evita Duarte, will use her skill at swaying the masses to restore him to office. When an obscure young woman is brutally murdered, police detective Roberto Leary concludes that the murderer mistook the girl for Evita, the intended target of someone out to eliminate the popular star from the political scene. The search for the killer soon involves the murdered girl's employer, who is Evita's dressmaker; her journalist lover; and Pilar, a seamstress in the dress shop and a tango dancer. The suspects include a leftist union leader who considers Juan Perón a fascist and a young lieutenant who feels Perón has dishonored the army. Their stories collide in this thrilling and sensuous historical mystery. Annamaria Alfieri's historical mysteries set in South America paint a vivid portrait of life at the time, in which the characters' motivations―love, fear, and ambition―all compete to create an evocative tale. Blood Tango is her finest achievement yet.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Historical

272 pages, Hardcover

First published June 25, 2013

About the author

Annamaria Alfieri is the pen name used by author Patricia King for her mystery novel City of Silver, set in 1650 in the wealthy Peruvian (now Bolivian) city of Potosi.

Reviews

[MissBecka Gee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't as interesting as I wanted it to be.
It's historical fiction, which is usually pretty good for me, but the writing is a bit too much historical and not enough fiction.
It did have a great line in it though...
"His dancing is about as sexy as long division."
LOLZ

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Blood Tango is a historical murder mystery set against a compelling background: Buenos Aires in the dramatic and tumultuous week in October 1945 covering Juan Peron’s removal from power by the military government, his arrest, and his release and the deal to allow for an election in early 1946 that Peron would (as all recognized at the time) go on to win. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, mass demonstrations in the streets and frantic maneuverings in the backrooms and barracks, a young woman is knifed to death. It might go all but unnoticed as the wheels of history turn, except for one thing: the young woman in question bears a striking resemblance to Eva Duarte, Colonel Peron’s controversial mistress.

There’s a lot of promise in that set-up, but unfortunately a lot of it went unrealized. Frankly, this book is surprisingly boring plot-wise. It’s a very paint-by-numbers predictable detective story. It starts out strong by offering four different suspects with opportunity and plausible, reasonable motives (although admittedly there are only two motives to go around), but it proceeds to play out without a single surprise. I feel like I’ve read this book before, maybe a dozen times. While the revelation of who the killer really is could be considered a twist, I figured it out long before I was supposed to and in retrospect I suspect a fan of the genre could easily have guessed it by the end of chapter one. From beginning to end, you don’t feel the suspense or any of the danger that is clearly supposed to be in the air.

Worse, it is made clear if not explicit to the reader that several of the suspects are innocent long before our detective Roberto Leary figures it out, meaning we cycle through a number of scenes that serve the character but not the story. They’re all the more unnecessary for how repetitive they get in a book that is not being used as anyone’s door-stopper.

Compounding the problem of it being a mystery without much mystery, the dialogue is stilted and boilerplate: unnatural, overdone and committed to telling and not showing. A lot of characters saying THIS IS WHAT I FEEL RIGHT NOW, and what they’re feeling isn’t much. Even that might be alleviated if most of the characters weren’t so thinly drawn. They’re very much plucked from stock, mostly given a single characteristic and a single note to play which they proceed to play all the way through. Forget three-dimensional – Roberto, the murdered girl Luz, her friend and key witness Pilar, their boss Claudia, and her doting husband Hernan are all striving for two.

There’s too much time wasted on an obligatory romance between Roberto and Pilar that is undeveloped and unconvincing. It annoyingly comes to fruition two-third of the way through, just in time to slow the pace of the story to a crawl when it should be speeding up. Perhaps it would work better if they didn’t feel like they were reading lines from a script, but honestly it could easily have been axed without anyone missing it. Both characters are frankly worse off for indulging in it as far as capturing your interest goes, and neither of them were in great shape to begin with.

All this is thrown into particularly sharp relief by the fact that the murder mystery is being told in parallel to the story of how various political players, including two of our suspects, the President and War Minister and Eva Duarte-soon-to-be-Peron herself, are wrestling with the great historical drama of that week. And that story is in fact gripping. It was a fascinating moment with more than enough real life twists and turns to satisfy a mystery reader and two deeply intriguing personalities imported from real life, and Alfieri’s own plot threads simply can’t compete with it. Even her original characters, still stuck with their single note to play, are more interesting when they’re trying to navigate the ever-shifting grounds. I found myself at several points impatiently skimming through scenes concerning the murder to get back to them. It reminded me of the Thomas Hardy quote: “Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.”

In fairness to Alfieri, she did not pick an easy fight there. Neither Eva Duarte nor Juan Peron, who is mainly sidelined but whose interior monologue and machinations we get a few glimpses of, were anywhere close to the dullest human being walking about the earth. She does a decent job capturing the charisma and contradictions of Eva as well as the cold calculation of Peron in a way that keeps you thinking about them. I have been inspired to change up the order of my to-be-read list and dig into Tomas Eloy Martinez’s Peron Novel after reading the Eva/Juan scenes.

Eva is really the only character one can say has a character arc in this book, and it fits in with the book’s best developed theme – the exploration of misogyny in this society. Eva over the course of this mad week learns how to harness her power, how to not just figure out what Peron wants her to do but how to figure out and execute the best plan for herself (to aid him, but still). Removed from Peron’s looming shadow while he is imprisoned, she rises from much-despised apparent pawn to much-despised apparent queen. She is a self-created woman, playing a part that she wrote for herself, and at last she has come to realize it. She has claimed agency in a world with complete contempt for her and that is convinced she has none.

The disgust for Eva, even from male characters we are supposed to sympathize with, is deeply ingrained in misogyny. Eva is seen by them in turn as an evil temptress, as a social climbing whore who forgot her roots and her place, and a powerless tool for Peron’s ambition. She is an object of fear, vicious anger and moral condemnation. She is intolerable to the men in this society, and it seems that this in large part stems from the fact that they can’t control her when they expect to be able to control women, to define women, and to sacrifice women who betray them. Even those who look favorably on her don’t really see her as a person – they see her as the Madonna standing opposed to the whore.

This theme also ties Eva in with the murder investigation. Luz experiences similar contempt and sense of ownership from her family and her ex-boyfriend. She is consistently denied agency, and even her death it seems is not about her. Without spoiling too much, the theme of this society’s men being unable to grasp the humanity of women ultimately plays a major role in the murderer’s true motive. Eva and Luz in their own ways are each the victims of men’s honor.

There are some less-developed thoughts on the nature of power and corruption, and about a society where the rule of law is crumbling, spies are everywhere and people who say things that various forces don’t like just disappear. There’s also some exploration of the strength of popular power. After all the maneuvering of the individual power players, towards the end they’re all just watching it play out, their fates in the hands of the people while they stand by and let it all happen. But these are probably best described as observations, rather than themes.

Alfieri does paint a nice picture of the scene in Buenos Aires in 1945. You feel the chaos of the time, the fear of a nation sliding towards an uncertain fate with no one really in command of the situation and everyone trying to come out on top (or at least safe). It could come off as a little random and under-written until it is compared with the history books, which portray some of the schemes and tactics as exactly as half-baked as Alfieri portrays them. I was glad to have known some of the history going in and to have thought to do some refresher reading on the details right beforehand. There are some aspects of the political culture that I would have been deeply confused by, especially with regards to civil-military relations and places of various groups on the political spectrum.

Honestly, I’m surprised how harsh this is reading back over it, because Alfieri also wrote a murder mystery set against the background of the War of the Triple Alliance which I still fully intend to read. That being said, unless you have a particular interest in this time period you can probably give this one a miss.

[Wanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The space of approximately one week is the timeframe of this novel. It is set in October, 1945, in post World War II Argentina. At the beginning of the novel, Juan Peron, Vice-President, Minister of War and Minister of Labor has been forced to resign. The power struggle among the politicians and military begins. The machinations of both groups forms part of the plot for the remainder of the book with Evita Duarte (later Peron) leading the workers in the demands of restoration of Peron. This historical part of the novel is interesting and adeptly woven into the larger story.

The fictional part of the novel revolves around the murder of a young girl whose only fault is that she closely resembles Evita Duarte.The young police detective has the job of trying to find the murderer among the several suspects which include the girl's father, lover, an army officer and an union leader. The question that must be answered is why she was killed---was it a personal reason or did someone think that she was Evita. All of this has to be done within the environment of political struggle, military coup and threatened labor strikes of the major unions.

The author has successfully created this sense of panic and fear. The fictional characters are quite real and personable--I found myself rooting for their success. An informative and interesting read.

[Anne Bartlett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alfieri does a great job on the atmosphere of a place and time not well known in the U.S. (despite the "Evita" musical) and the mystery turns out to be more interesting in the end than it seems for much of the book. I enjoyed it, but am not giving it a higher rating because the characters don't have much depth. I thought her earlier book, "City of Silver" was somewhat better. But I'll definitely look for more of her work.

[AdiTurbo · Rating 2 out of 5]

The background of this novel could have made it fascinating, with a murder mystery thrown in. But in reality it was flat, too slow, and the writer wasn't good enough to make the best of her good idea. A waste.

[Cara Huss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the historical part very informative as I am not especially familiar with Argentinian history. I wasn't crazy about the whirlwind romance that lands the couple in bed before they barely knew each other. It detracted from the rest of the story for me.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish this were better written. It has a decent mystery plot with a compelling back story. The amateurish writing, however, gets in the way.

[William · Rating 1 out of 5]

A poorly written book full of cliches. Too bad because the subject and location (Peron and Argentina) are an interesting subjects to build a mystery around.

[Susan Spann · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s not an easy thing to write a novel which includes Eva Duarte. “Evita” entered the popular culture decades ago through the musical which bears her name, and the historical record alternately lionizes and vilifies the woman who loved and married Argentinian President Juan Perón. Even those of us who have read her history often find her difficult to understand … and the thought of trying to fictionalize her in any realistic way is a Herculean task at best.

Yet Alfieri not only does it, she does it brilliantly.

The rest of the novel’s characters have similar depth and complexity. Investigator Roberto Leary must tread the dangerous waters of the Argentine police department on the eve of Perón’s ascension to power, attempting to solve a mysterious murder that no one wants him to solve. Couturier Claudia struggles with grief and guilt when her assistant, a girl with the fortune (or possibly misfortune) to look like Perón’s mistress Eva Duarte, is brutally murdered – an ironic twist because Claudia hired the girl to save her from abuse. And those are merely two examples – Alfieri’s cast is masterfully drawn and painted with a depth that makes each character spring from the page.

The mystery itself is engaging, complex, and features an interesting twist: the investigators cannot tell if the girl – who was using the dressmaker’s shop to hide from enemies of her own – was murdered because she resembled Evita or because of her own, complicated past.

Alfieri’s novel features a tightly-drawn plot, engaging narrative, intriguing characters and a “read it all in one sitting” pace that grabs hold on page 1 and doesn’t let go until the surprising–and satisfying–conclusion.

This is a dance you don’t want to miss.

My rating: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

*Disclosure: Annamaria Alfieri and I are both edited by Toni Kirkpatrick at Minotaur Books. That fact did not impact or prejudice this review in any way. Whether or not I know an author, I write a review only if I can give a thoroughly honest opinion of the book.

[Hallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anamaria Alfieri's sets "Blood Tango" in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1945 at one of history's great turning points. "Turmoil had stalked the nation for over two years. Chaos prowled ever nearer" after the country's most powerful and feared leader, Colonel Juan Perón, is removed from office. As his future hung in the balance, his mistress Evita Duarte, a hyperbolic "tiny sylph of a woman" with her "rage against injustice and hunger for fame," comes into her own.

During a tumultuous farewell rally for Perón, a young seamstress, who is wearing a dress that Evita gave her and who has styled herself to resemble her idol, is stabbed to death. The story shifts to police detective Roberto Leary. He wonders if the killer mistook the seamstress for Evita, or if she was stalked and killed by her brutal father or abusive husband from whom she's been hiding.

Leary faces a formidable challenge as the murder investigation inevitably gets embroiled in the political upheaval with its larger than life personalities. His judgment becomes clouded when a memorable, passionate tango dance ignites his lust.

This ambitious novel doesn't romanticize its historical figures. As Evita might have wanted, the common people are its stars.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this one. I know very little about the Evita Peron period and this murder mystery set in the time period of Evita was very interesting.A good solid page turner with a cool twist at the end.