This image is the cover for the book Who Killed Palomino Molero?

Who Killed Palomino Molero?

The Nobel Prize–winning author draws on his own investigation of an infamous murder in 1950s Peru to construct this acclaimed detective novel.

When a young airman is found murdered near an air force base in the northern desert, Lieutenant Silva and his assistant, Officer Lituma, must investigate. With not so much as a squad car, they must hitch a ride to the crime scene. Though their superiors are indifferent, and the victim’s commanding officer is openly hostile, Silva and Lituma remain committed to solving the riddle of young Palomino Molero’s death.

In his first detective novel, Mario Vargas Llosa delivers a deftly plotted story as he explores one of his signature themes: the despair one feels when attempting to be honest in a corrupt society.

“Evoking landscape and mores in writing that is spare, rich and cruelly beautiful . . . the novel manages to meditate on evil, art, love and race while going about its business of solving a crime.” —The New York Times

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's foremost author and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1994 he was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and in 1995 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His many distinguished works include The Storyteller, TheFeast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Bad Girl, Conversation in the Cathedral, TheWay to Paradise, and The War of the End of the World. He lives in London.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux