Review: BETTY BOO, Claudia Pineiro

• 
  This edition an e-book on  Kindle
  
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bitter Lemon Press (February 9, 2016)
• Miranda France (Translator) 
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 410 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1908524553
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1908524553

Synopsis (publisher)

The fourth novel from Claudia Piñeiro, South America's best-selling crime novelist.

When a renowned Buenos Aires industrialist is found dead at his home in an exclusive gated community called La Maravillosa, the novelist Nurit Iscar (once nicknamed Betty Boo owing to a resemblance to the cartoon character Betty Boop) is contracted by a former lover, the editor of a national newspaper, to cover the story. Nurit teams up with the paper's veteran, but now demoted, crime reporter. Soon they realize that they are falling in love, which complicates matters deliciously.

The murder is no random crime but one in a series that goes to the heart of the establishment. Five members of the Argentine industrial and political elite, who all went to the same boarding-school, have died in apparently innocent circumstances. The Maravillosa murder is just the last in the series and those in power in Argentina are not about to allow all this brought to light. Too much is at stake.

My Take

This novel comes as a reminder of how much translated crime fiction has fallen off my radar in recent years, and also what a different flavour this author in particular brings.

The Crime writer of the national newspaper covering this murder in a gated community is a fairly new appointment, inexperienced, and is referred to as Crime Boy. His editor decides to provide a different slant to the case by installing a novelist, a former lover, in the gated community, to write a series of articles about the life that the murder victim was leading. These articles will be published simultaneously with whatever Crime Boy can provide.  The victim's wife had been murdered in the same house three years earlier, but apart from the way she was murdered, was there any connection? 

In addition the newspaper is still employing its former crime writer, on what he regards as fairly useless tasks, and he decides, against his better judgement, that Crime Boy needs tutelage.  Between them, with Betty Boo, the three of them make a formidable team.

A most enjoyable read.

My rating: 4.6

I've also read

• THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS
• ALL YOURS
  

Review: ALL YOURS, Claudia Pineiro

• Format: Kindle (Amazon)
• File Size: 218 KB
• Print Length: 178 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 190473880X
• Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press; Tra Org edition (December 18, 2011)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc
• Translated by Miranda France.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005EFWTQE
• Source: I bought it

Synopsis (Amazon)

Ines is convinced that every wife is bound to be betrayed one day, so she is not surprised to find a note in her husband Ernesto’s briefcase with a heart smeared in lipstick crossed by the words “All Yours” and signed, “Your true love.”

She follows him to a park on a rainy winter evening and witnesses a violent quarrel he has with another woman. The woman collapses; Ernesto sinks her body in a nearby lake. When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the case she provides him with an alibi. After all, hatred can bring people together as urgently as love. But Ernesto cannot bring his sexual adventures to an end, so Ines concocts a plan for revenge from which there is no return.

Claudia Piñeiro, formerly a journalist and playwright, is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into six languages. All Yours follows on the success of Thursday Night Widows, published in 2010 in the United States.

My Take

Set in Buenos Aires, this novel has an interesting structure: mostly the voice that we hear is Ines herself; but often there are phone conversations between Lali and her friend Paula which is how we know that Lali is in trouble; sometimes we are provided with material photocopied from a Spanish book on forensic practice found in Ines' bedside table. Most incidents are provided without author intervention or description.

Ines has nothing much to do all day except her housework so she keeps her house spic and span. It also means that she hasn't got much else to focus on apart from herself and Ernesto, providing of course you discount their daughter Lali, who is 17, finishing school, and in all sorts of trouble, but neither of her parents are aware of that.

Ines thinks she has now got Ernesto where she wants him, but then she discovers he is still leading a double life, and from that point on she can only see one way out.

Although I've read ALL YOURS for the South American category of the 2012 Global Reading Challenge it doesn't seem to me that I've learnt much about life in Buenos Aires. Having read this and THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS I can now see why Claudia Pineiro is such a popular Argentinian crime fiction writer. Her novels are unusual to say the least.

My rating: 4.5

REVIEW: THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS, Claudio Pineiro

Published in English by Bitter Lemon Press, London, 2009
First published in Spanish as Las viudas de los jueves 2005
Winner of the Clarin Award (Argentina) 2005
English translation by Miranda France
ISBN 978-1-904738-41-1
274 pages

Every Thursday night Teresa Scaglia's husband and three friends got together at the Scaglia's house to have dinner, play cards, and drink. For a long time it had been traditional for the wives to go to the cinema. Teresa Scaglia arrives home to find her husband and two of his friends dead at the bottom of their pool.

The Cascade Heights Country Club is a gated community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It consists of five hundred acres ringed by a perimeter fence. It has a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, two club houses, and its own private security. Inside its gates, carefully vetted residents live deceptively carefree lives, dependent on the high salaries earned by the male residents. The opulent life lived inside the gates, characterised by non-working wives, rounds of social and dinner engagements, tennis and golf parties, children attending private schools, nannies, maids, and gardeners, is very different to that lived by people outside.

THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS opens dramatically with Ronie Guevera, who should have been next door with the other men at Scaglia's, falling down the stairs and achieving a compound fracture of his leg. Ronie has returned from Scaglia's early and it is only at the end of the novel that we fully understand why, as his wife Virginia is driving him to the hospital, he demands to be taken to El Tano Scaglia's. Virginia ignores him.

The explanation of who killed the men in the swimming pool and why, that is, the crime fiction element, seems to take a back seat to description of how this gated community has developed from the end of the 1980s to the night of the deaths in 2001. We see the development mainly from the point of view of Virginia Guevera, but occasionally through the eyes of other women and even the ambitious men.

Gated communities became a feature of the noveau riche not only in Argentina but also in USA and Australia at this time.Even today here in Australia new developments, often known as "estates", often have substantial walls but the gates are no longer being installed.

So what Claudio Pineiro gives us in THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS is, as the blurb on the back of the book says, "a psychological portrait of a middle class living beyond its means and struggling to conceal deadly secrets."

Dare I say that this book is not primarily crime fiction, although that is one of its elements?
Others will simply read it as "literature", for the insight it gives into Argentinian society of the time.

My rating: 4.5


Other reviews to check:

• A Work in Progress found it reminiscent of Barbara Vine: "as much a contemporary morality tale as a crime novel."
• Bitter Lemon Press
• Petrona: "a hilarious yet telling social satire, extremely readable"
• Crime Scraps:  "the first, but I hope not the last, of Claudia Pineiro's novels to be available in English"
• The Game's Afoot:  "a moral tale that has universal implications."
• Reactions to Reading: "as a window into a community you might never see otherwise I highly recommend it."

I read this as part of the 2010 Global Reading Challenge.