Who Killed Palomino Molero?

In a small Peruvian coastal town, a young air force pilot — Palomino Molero, beloved and gentle — is found tortured and murdered, impaled on a carob tree. Lieutenant Lituma and his superior, Officer Comandante Silva, investigate in the heat and the dust, and what they find is a story of desire, hierarchy, and the particular cruelties that class and power arrange in any society that refuses to examine them honestly.

Vargas Llosa at his most economical — a novel of barely a hundred and sixty pages that manages to be simultaneously a tightly plotted crime story, a portrait of provincial Peruvian society, and a study of the mechanisms by which powerful people protect themselves from consequence. The investigation is gripping; the ending is devastating.

An ideal entry point for readers new to Vargas Llosa — and a demonstration of what this Nobel laureate can achieve in miniature. Published by Faber & Faber.