News & Features » October 2017 » FREE E-BOOK: Download Adios Muchachos for free through Sunday, Oct 15!
FREE E-BOOK: Download Adios Muchachos for free through Sunday, Oct 15!
To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 through October 15), we are offering Uruguayan author Daniel Chavarría’s first English work, Adios Muchachos, as a free e-book download! Two more of Chavarría’s titles, The Eye of Cybele and the follow-up to Adios Muchachos, Tango for a Torturer, are available for 25% through our website, as are our other Latin American interest titles.
From today until Sunday, October 15, download a copy of Adios Muchachos for absolutely free at the links below:
Download in mobi format for kindle.
Download in epub format for all other e-readers.
**If you have any trouble downloading the mobi or epub file, your browser preference may be set to open the download in a new window. Try right-clicking the link and choosing “Save Link As . . .” If this doesn’t work, email info@akashicbooks.com and we can email you the free mobi or epub directly.**
THE FIRST SUSPENSE NOVEL in English-translation by internationally acclaimed Uruguayan mystery writer Daniel Chavarría, Adios Muchachos is a dark, erotic, brutally funny romp through the sexual underworld and black-market boardrooms of post-Cold War Cuba. Seen through Chavarría’s compassionate but uncompromising eyes, present-day Havana is a crossroads for petty hustlers looking for an easy mark, two-time losers looking for a fresh start, and high-rolling international speculators looking to take advantage of them all.
THE NOVEL DESCRIBES the ill-fated alliance between Alicia, a stunningly beautiful prostitute who openly displays her voluptuous wares by bicycle on the city streets, and Victor King, a desperately ambitious Canadian businessman with an enormous appetite for kinky sex and buried treasure—and a striking resemblance to movie star Mel Gibson.
FOLLOWING AN EARLY EROTIC ENTANGLEMENT of their own, Victor hires Alicia to lure a series of handsome lovers into the bedroom of his estate for the voyeuristic gratification of his mysterious wife, Elizabeth, who watches the action with her husband through a two-way mirror. After a sultry drunken dance results in the accidental death of Victor’s wealthy Dutch business partner, Rieks Groote, Victor sees his ambitions for wealth suddenly go up in smoke and Alicia faces the end to her dreams of escaping her dreary, dead-end life on the island.
HUSTLERS ALL THE WAY, the two quickly decide to turn disaster into opportunity, hiding the body in a freezer and hatching an elaborate kidnapping scheme that will allow them to steal millions of dollars from the Groote family and start a new life together off the island. Through a series of startling plot twists and slapstick misadventures, Victor and Alicia find themselves unwittingly manipulated and ultimately outmaneuvered by a sympathetic fellow hustler. In the end, everything revolves around the secret ingredient to an old family recipe and a long-overdue nose job—as only one of the novel’s characters is able to make off with the loot and bid “adios” to Cuba and the past.
PRAISE FOR Adios Muchachos
“Daniel Chavarría has long been recognized as one of Latin America’s finest writers. Now he again proves why with Adios Muchachos, a comic mystery peopled by a delightfully mad band of miscreants, all of them led by a woman you will not soon forget—Alicia, the loveliest bicycle whore in all Havana.”
—Edgar Award-winning author William Heffernan
“Celebrated in Latin America for his noir detective fiction, Uruguayan author Chavarría makes his English-language debut with this fast-paced novel, set in Cuba. Featuring Alicia, a bicycle-riding prostitute, and Victor, a Canadian financier with a shady past and a few current secrets, Adios Muchachos spins the tale of a caper gone awry, where no one is particularly bad and everyone is on the take. Castro’s Havana has not appeared this sunny in many years, nor have its crooks been this good-natured. There is an accidentally dead Dutch millionaire, a man with a nose so large that he wears a mask to hide it when he makes love, a recipe for smoked eels in mango sauce, and a defective Chinese bicycle. Mixed together, these ingredients make a zesty Cuban paella of a novel that’s impossible to put down. This is a great read, recommended for public libraries.”
—Andrea Caron Kempf, Library Journal
“Out of the mystery wrapped in an enigma that, over the last forty years, has been Cuba for the US, comes a Uruguayan voice so cheerful, a face so laughing, and a mind so deviously optimistic that we can only hope this is but the beginning of a flood of Latin America’s indomitable novelists, playwrights, storytellers. Welcome, Daniel Chavarría.”
—Donald Westlake, author of Trust Me on This
“Daniel Chavarría is a prince of a fellow, larger than life and twice as much fun.”
—Lawrence Block, author of Eight Million Ways to Die
“If for no other reason than Daniel Chavarría and his picaresque novels of money, sex, and crime in Havana, this U.S. embargo against Cuba must end forthwith. In Adios Muchachos, Señor Chavarría offers up European millionaires grubbing for ever more riches, wily ocean salvers hunting for gold in long-sunken Spanish galleons, and murder most foul and deliciously bloody. For extra measure, there is the considerable charm and ingenuity of an erotic scamp by the name of Alicia. I recommend that we all do as Fidel likely does: light up a cigar and turn Chavarria’s pages, with pleasure.”
—Thomas Adcock, Edgar Award-winning author of Grief Street
“Pulp fiction in Castro’s Cuba. A picaresque novel with sex, scheming, and, well, more sex.”
—Martin Cruz Smith, author of Havana Bay
Posted: Oct 4, 2017
Category: News | Tags: Adios Muchachos, Castro, Cuba, Daniel Chavarria, e-book, free, free e-book, Havana, Hispanic Heritage, humor, National Hispanic Heritage Month, promotion, Tango for a Torturere, The Eye of Cybele