Santiago Gamboa’s fascinating characters introduce an addictive and nuanced narrative about conflict-rife Colombia.”—Fantastic Fiction
“Gamboa's talent at cultivating intrigue and the extravagant energy of his stories make him compulsive reading.”—Times Literary Supplement
“For my money, there may be no more ambitious, accomplished writer than Gamboa at work in international noir today. Gamboa brings a searching, penetrating style to the prose and unwinds a genuinely compelling and provocative story that interrogates the very nature of violence and truth.”—Crime Reads
“An engrossing thriller set in a modern-day Colombia haunted by the legacy of decades of armed conflict....Gamboa has crafted an effective thriller that thrives on his empathetic imagination.”—Shelf Awareness
“Each novel by Santiago Gamboa is at the forefront of the best Latin American novels. Gamboa dismantles the legacy of Chandler and Hammett, adapting it to the craggy environs of Colombia, and adds to it a tireless sense of ethics. His novels revitalize a genre that we thought could do no more.”—Martín Solares, author of The Black Minutes
“A richly textured thriller about competing religious organizations in post-civil war Colombia.”—The Washington Post
For Return to the Dark Valley
“Fans of Roberto Bolaño will feel right at home in this globetrotting tale of misfit poets and ultraviolent drug lords . . . A page turner”—Miami Rail
“Action-packed plotting propels this rabidly contemporary novel forward, as it examines the movement of people across the shifting geopolitical landscape, the impossibility of returning and the potential redemptive power of poetry.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Gamboa possesses considerable talent at creating energetic scenes that spiral off in intriguing directions.”—San Francisco Chronicle
For Night Prayers
“Brilliantly translated, Night Prayers is an incredible reading experience with a pounding heart and wisdom to boot.”—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore
“Gamboa's work calls to mind Roberto Bolaño in its masterful suspense, complex literary references, and frank depiction of violence, sex, and drugs.”—Publisher’s Weekly
2021-09-29
In a remote stretch of southwestern Colombia, Bogota-based journalist Julieta Lezama investigates an ultraviolent confrontation that officials pretend never happened.
Before mysteriously disappearing, an orphaned 14-year-old boy who witnessed the clash tells the 40-ish, trash-talking Julieta how the confrontation ended with a black-attired figure emerging from a bazooka-ed Hummer and escaping in a helicopter. Everyone else in town claims they didn't see or hear anything. All evidence of the confrontation is cleared away. With her assistant, Johana, a veteran of the FARC guerrilla group, Julieta determines that a simmering Mafia-like conflict between a Pentecostal church and an evangelical one had something to do with the roadside drama. The story leads Julieta to French Guiana and Brazil and intense one-on-ones with the churches' corrupt pastors—who, for all their dark edges, win her over with their charisma. Each of them gets to tell his anguished story in long, italicized sections that touch on the "perverse republic" that is Colombia. "When a person screams into the darkness, what reply is possible?" one of them asks. For all that, the book is lifted by its cutting humor, which takes on a dreamy, almost surreal quality. The deeper Julieta gets into the case, the more she drinks, happily aware of what she's doing. For the prosecutor she's working with, the more bodies pile up, the giddier he gets in urging her on. Gamboa can go so deep into a character, such as a pastor obsessed with gold, that he loses the thread of the main narrative. But the book never loses the spark of originality.
An absorbing—at times almost too absorbing—mystery by a notable Colombian author.
