Last Seen in Havana - Book Tour and Giveaway

​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. 

Last Seen in Havana
A Havana Mystery Book 4
by Teresa Dovalpage
Genre: Mystery 

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.

Newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba in 2019 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?

Thirty-three years earlier, in 1986, 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 the truth about her mother, uncovering shocking family secrets in the process . . .


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​The Ashen Hour

At the ashen hour, that peculiar time of the day when night hasn’t fallen yet but you can’t see the edge of things, when the whole world seems to have gone underwater, my mother sometimes came to me. It wasn’t a dream, for I kept my eyes open the whole time, nor a childhood fantasy. It was a betwixt and between state, a rip in the fabric of reality, the glimpse of a mirage.
I remember one evening when the house felt quieter and emptier than usual. The blue glare of the television was the only light in the living room. I tiptoed outside and sat in the backyard under a mango tree while Mamina, my grandmother, busied herself in the kitchen. She was making congrí—black beans and rice, cooked together, with cumin and tiny pieces of bacon. I smelled fried chicken too (fried in lard, of course!) and my mouth watered.
I was getting hungry but soon forgot about the food. My mother approached quietly, her feet not quite touching the gravel path. I looked up and knew instantly that it was her, though I could not remember her face.
“¡Mamá!”
She knelt by my side and caressed my hair. A smell of roses engulfed me. I waited for her to explain those years of absence, to apologize and say that she loved me. But Mamina’s voice always broke the spell.
“Merceditas, where are you?”
My mother never came. The ghost of my nine-year-old self stayed under the tree, waiting for her.

Death Under the Perseids
A Havana Mystery
(Prequel to Last Seen in Havana)

There’s no such thing as a free cruise in Cuban American author Teresa Dovalpage's addictively clever new Havana mystery.

Cuban-born Mercedes Spivey and her American husband, Nolan, win a five-day cruise to Cuba. Although the circumstances surrounding the prize seem a little suspicious to Mercedes, Nolan’s current unemployment and their need to spice up their marriage make the decision a no-brainer. Once aboard, Mercedes is surprised to see two people she met through her ex-boyfriend Lorenzo: former University of Havana professor Selfa Segarra and down-on-his-luck Spanish writer Javier Jurado. Even stranger: they also received a free cruise.

When Selfa disappears on their first day at sea, Mercedes and Javier begin to wonder if their presence on the cruise is more than coincidence. Mercedes confides her worries to her husband, but he convinces her that it’s all in her head.

However, when Javier dies under mysterious circumstances after disembarking in Havana, and Nolan is nowhere to be found, Mercedes scrambles through the city looking for him, fearing her suspicions were correct all along.


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Short intro: Sarah, a young American living in Cuba in 1987, marries a Cuban Army officer in a ceremony that turns out quite different from what she had expected.

The wedding

The wedding ceremony was quite different from what Sarah had expected. First, not even one of Joaquín’s relatives attended. His mother had agreed to come but her daughter, Mercedes, had been admitted to the hospital the day before.
“My sister has cancer,” Joaquín said somberly, “and I don’t think she’s going to make it.”
“¡Pobrecita!”
Sarah had yet to meet her in-laws. They all lived in another province and hadn’t shown any interest (or perhaps didn’t have the means) to travel to Havana. She had been looking forward to seeing them at the wedding.
Then, she had assumed they would get married at El Palacio de Los Matrimonios. The very name, Palace of Weddings, sounded so romantic! She had loved the white building, the car outside with the balloons attached, the rice tossing . . . But Joaquín had other plans. On the Big Day, they went to an office downtown, a notaría, in a borrowed jeep. Lo and a friend of Joaquín’s signed as witnesses, but there were no formal bridesmaids or groomsmen. Afterward, they all drove to a small park located near the University of Havana. Five more couples were there to participate in a public collective wedding. They gathered around an obelisk.
“The ashes of Julio Antonio Mella, a revolutionary leader from the thirties, are inside,” Lo whispered. “It’s such a special place!”
Sarah would have preferred a location with a happier vibe, but it was too late now. Well, the Alma Mater statue on the university steps as a background would make for an interesting wedding picture. Rob would appreciate it. More so now, that he had started college and found his soulmate too, another Berkeley student named Vincent. Oh, what a pity they couldn’t have come to her wedding either!
The grooms wore crisp uniforms and the brides, white satin gowns accentuated by mariposa bouquets. Fredesbinda had added an extender to Sarah’s dress at the last minute. (The dress had been rented at a shop called “La Casa de las Novias.”) Sarah was showing a little, but not embarrassingly so. In any case, it didn’t bother her, at least not as much as the fact that she stuck out like a sore thumb, too white and blond, taller than all the women present and even some men.
The couples left their bouquets at the base of the obelisk. The ceremony proceeded with military marches played by a brass band and came to a close with a long patriotic speech delivered by a colonel. Sarah couldn’t help but notice that he did his best to imitate Fidel’s emphatic style.
“We will defend this soil, this flag, this country with our own blood if needed! ¡Patria o Muerte!”
“¡Venceremos!”
Sarah rolled her eyes. Revolutionary slogans were okay at a CDR event, but at a wedding? Please. While the speech elongated into infinity, she kept thinking of Pauline, and how much she would have enjoyed being there despite the agitprop. Would she have traveled to Havana? Sarah believed she would, when she was in good health. Pauline had been adventurous, and Sarah was proud to have inherited her drive. In moments like that, she missed her grandma terribly. She missed her parents too and thought she was cheating them out of an important occasion they would have loved to be part of. Though . . . would they? They didn’t have Pauline’s open-mindedness. 
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**Don’t miss the rest of the series!**

​Find them on Amazon-
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0881XQZPK
​

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 theater plays. She lives with her husband, one dog and too many barn cats. Her website is  http://teredovalpage.com

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Do you often do research before writing your novels? What was the process for Last Seen in Havana?
Since most of my novels are set in contemporary Cuba, where I lived thirty years, I usually don’t need more than an occasional consultation—like googling a restaurant so see if it is still open or asking my mother about, let’s say, the products we used to buy with the ration card. However, for the chapters that take place in the 80s, I resorted to various sources, including digitized Cuban newspapers from those years.

How much do you remember from that time?
Actually, a lot. Many of the places and events that I mention in the book are still vivid in my memory, such as the diplotiendas (dollar stores where Cubans could only enter when accompanied by foreigners) and the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced from Cuba.

Is there any particular chapter that contains autobiographical elements?
Many. I personally experienced having to ask a foreigner to accompany me to buy at a diplotienda, for example, and I still remember the humiliation of being considered a second-class citizen in my own country. But speaking of more pleasant things, the chapter about Mercedes’s baptism at the Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Parish is based on very dear memories because I used to attend that church. That’s how I described it:
The Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Parish looked more like a cathedral than a regular church. Neo-gothic in style with an impressively high bell tower topped by a huge bronze cross, it was located on a busy street called Reina.
Even the priest who officiates the baptism, and whom I mention by his real name, Father Miyares, was well known and loved by the (few) young people who attended mass there.

Although most of the novel takes place in Havana, there are also some scenes set in Pinar del Río, where Mercedes’s father’s family is from. Why Pinar del Río?
I attended the “school in the fields” (forty-five days at a camp picking tobacco leaves) in Pinar del Río, which was the inspiration for my novel A Girl like Che Guevara. I also visited several tourist destinations mentioned in the novel: the Viñales Valley and the Soroa orchid garden. On the other hand, I wanted to take readers out of Havana and give them a tour of what we call “el campo,” the countryside. It’s really pretty. This is how Mercedes describes her arrival at the family house in La Coloma:
After we got to La Coloma, Satiadeva left behind the main street, flanked by huge flamboyanes, and turned into a dirt road. A small house was nestled in at the end surrounded by coconut trees. Rows of what I assumed were tobacco plants, with pale pink flowers and bright green leaves, stretched out before us. The breeze made them sway gently.

Will there be a third novel with Mercedes as the protagonist?
Yes, there will be a third one. When Mercedes leaves Cuba, her friend Candela has managed to rescue a manuscript called Diario de una hechicera, A Sorcerer’s Journal, written by the former owner of the house where Mercedes grew up. The sorceress is a character that won’t leave me alone, so she will end up having her own story!

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