The combination may be what makes Latour sound so authoritative about both shores. His hero, Eliot Steil, is the product of a Cuban mother and an American father whose business kept him in Cuba for a while and whose obsession with a shrewd, coldhearted Cajun later kept him away. As the book begins, Steil the son is working as an English teacher in Havana. He is soon getting ahead thanks to deals with one corrupt cop and various criminals, all of whom come in handy when he tries to figure out why an American stranger would have come out of the blue to kill him before he reached the States. Latour's tone is fascinating.
Crime novels tend to be either moralistic or hiply amoral with a satiric or leering edge.
To him it makes perfect sense that a man who would become an English teacher in Cuba would become a thief in Miami. And Latour's criminals may not have hearts of gold, but they don't go around killing or double-crossing one another, either. Cuban versions of what businessmen must be. The one drawback is all the detail about the characters' pasts that is not essential to the plot. There is really too much of it for genre fiction.