Sweet Money
Ernesto Mallo
2011, Bitter Lemon Press
223 pages
THE ENIGMATIC Superintendent Lascano is back to spin the needle on the moral compass we use to try and pick our way through the emotional debris of a modern Argentina cast adrift. This time he is investigating the murder of the chief of police by drug-dealing cops hungry to control Buenos Aires. His only potential and unlikely ally may be the thief Mole Miranda, a mirror image of the broken cop but whose shaky humanity in the face of a broken country, and belief in a strange kind of honour, is a common value that harks back to times past. This is the second in the Lascano trilogy after the masterful Needle in a Haystack by a writer whose past life as a militant member of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (later absorbed by the Montoneros) has given him deadly insight into the sharp edges of an untamed society. – GO’T
