Thursday Night Widows

October 26, 2009
Near the start of Piñeiro's clever U.S. debut, which won Argentina's Clarin Prize for fiction and has been made into a film, the bodies of three well-to-do men—El Tano Scaglia, Martín Urovich and Gustavo Masotta—turn up in the Scaglias' swimming pool in Cascades Heights, a gated community outside Buenos Aires. The three men, along with Ronie Guevara, regularly had dinner on Thursday nights at one of their houses in this exclusive enclave. The search for the truth behind their deaths takes a backseat to the soap operaish goings-on of the Cascade Heights set, as seen in flashbacks largely through the eyes of Guevara's realtor wife, Virginia. Readers with an interest in contemporary Argentina will appreciate how this crime novel illuminates the hypocrisies of the country's upper classes after 9/11.

December 1, 2009
In an exclusive gated community 30 miles outside of Buenos Aires, Maria Virginia works as a real-estate agent after her husband loses his job. Readers gradually become acquainted with the rich families of the Heights through Maria, who is privy to their secrets, selling them their homes while living in the community herself. But she is always a bit of an outsider, one of the few women who work, and when the bodies of three of the most prominent men in the community are found dead in a neighbors backyard pool, she must decide where her loyalties lie, since her husband was visiting the three men shortly before their deaths. A fast-paced thriller, Pineiros novel describes and critiques the lifestyles of Argentinas nouveau riche, chronicling their rise into the exclusive world of the Heights and their downfalls as the economy sours after 9/11. An excellent choice for fans of international crime stories.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)