Born in Havana, Cuba to an influential local family (one of her relatives has his face on the Cuban $100 bill), Carolina Garcia-Aguilera moved to the USA aged ten.
After studying history and Latin American affairs at university, she took a job as a private investigator in Florida. Today, she runs her own detective agency in Miami.
Real-life experience—as a PI and as a member of the Cuban-American community—underpins Garcia-Aguilera’s writing. In Guadalupe Solano, the fiery, petite Cuban-American PI who features in seven of her novels, she has created one of the stand-out women gumshoes in the crime genre.
Here's a deep dive into Garcia-Aguilera's impressive list to get you started.
Havana Heat
A legendary tapestry reputedly given to Christopher Columbus by Queen Isabella of Spain is at the heart of the fifth of Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano series.
Our heroine is attending a society wedding in Florida when she’s approached by the matriarch of a prominent exiled Cuban family, Lucia Mendoza. The Columbus tapestry, the old lady tells her, is one of the family’s proudest possessions, and she wants to see it again before she dies.
There are two problems: firstly, the tapestry is in the ancestral home in Havana, which the family fled when Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries came to power; secondly, other members of the Mendoza family believe the tapestry does not exist and is simply a figment of the old lady’s imagination.
Lupe’s task is to verify the existence of the tapestry and—if it’s genuine—retrieve it. The only trouble is that somebody else has the same idea and is willing to kill to achieve their aim.
Bloody Waters
Lupe makes her debut in this emotionally-charged mystery from 1996. The self-styled ‘Cuban-American Princess’ is hired by the adoptive parents of a little girl whose rare genetic disease can only be treated via a bone marrow transplant from her birth mother.
Tracking down the woman in question is a matter of life or death for the child. Navigating her way through the tangled world of adoption, both legal and illegal, stirs feelings of vulnerability in Solano who is still grieving the death of her own mother.
Combined with the heart-rending desperation of the parents, the PI’s feelings of loss lend this tightly plotted novel genuine emotional depth.
A Miracle in Paradise
Lupe’s sister is a Catholic Nun, which leads our sexy private eye into the claustrophobic world of The Order of the Illumination of the Sacred Virgin.
The exiled Cuban religious order has predicted that the statue of the Virgin at a revered Cuban shrine will weep real tears on the anniversary of Cuban Independence.
Lupe is called in as a neutral witness to verify the miracle as it happens. However, she quickly discovers that all is not quite as it seems inside the walls of the convent.
As she probes deeper, Lupe finds that the cloisters of a nunnery can sometimes be even more deadly than the mean streets of Miami’s roughest neighbourhoods.
Bitter Sugar
The savage fallout from Castro’s revolution continue to ripple through Florida’s Cuban ex-patriot community in this 2001 mystery. Lupe’s father is an old traditionalist who disapproves of his daughter’s profession and isn’t shy of saying so.
Naturally then, she’s delighted when he asks her to help his oldest friend resolve a family dispute. Ramon and Alexander’s family own sugar plantations in Cuba. A Spanish company wants to re-open them, but before they can do so they need the brothers to renounce their rights to the property. In return they are offering a handsome cash payout.
Ramon refuses to sell, but Alexander is desperate for the money. The pair argue publicly. Alexander disappears, then turn up dead.
Ramon is the obvious suspect, but Papi Solano is convinced his old pal is innocent and wants his daughter to prove it. So, no pressure, then.
Bloody Twist
The seventh, and so far final, mystery in the Lupe Solano series is satisfyingly taut, tough, and just a little strange.
Back on the job after the brutal conclusion to events in Bitter Sugar, our feisty and stylish gumshoe is helping her on-off boyfriend, hotshot defense attorney Tommy MacDonald, with his latest case—a double homicide the police are trying to pin on his client, the mysterious Madeline Meadows.
The highest paid call girl in Miami, Miss Meadows, has a past that’s as blank as an Arctic snowdrift and claims to be a virgin. To try and protect her and also himself, MacDonald employs Solano not only to find out who Meadows really is, but also to try and identify the true killer.
It will prove a violent and bizarre journey into the past—a bumpy ride that Solano may not survive.
Miami Noir: The Classics
As well as penning novels, Garcia-Aguilera is also an accomplished writer of short crime fiction. The quality of her work can be measured by its selection for this outstanding anthology edited by Les Standiford.
The Cuban-American’s entry, Washington Avenue, is a sharply observed vignette of barroom life and the Florida drug trade of the 1990s.
Crackling with great dialogue, it sits proudly alongside stories by legends of the genre such as Charles Willeford and Elmore Leonard, and is not overmatched by any of them.
Featured image: Anton Tkachenko / Unsplash
