"What defines a city is the history of its crimes," Alberto Mussa writes in The Mystery of Rio, and for every city there is a defining crime that could happen only there.
On a Friday the 13th in 1913, the personal secretary to the president of the Brazilian republic is found dead in the House of Swaps. This legendary mansion in Rio de Janeiro is the sex clinic of Miroslav Zmuda, a researcher into the physiology of coitus, and secretly also houses a magnificent brothel where the nurses double as prostitutes. The victim has been discovered tied to the iron bedposts and strangled, gagged and blindfolded. Last seen with him was Fortunata, a beautiful young woman who came to the brothel a virgin and has now vanished, leaving her gold earrings with a 100-year-old sorcerer who haunts the cemetery.
The attractive and ambitious Sebastiao Baeta is determined to solve the mystery. He is a renowned forensic investigator--and a regular patron of the House of Swaps, where he and his wife attend couples night.
Compacting Brazilian lore into heavily loaded sentences, Mussa's prose mimics the earnest thoroughness of a police report. Baeta's search for the murderer leads him through curios and horrors, including a witch walled alive into the Imperial Palace, a mass grave of sailors, women given in marriage to the best shark hunters, macumba rites and the lost treasure map of Lourenco Cao. Brace yourself for a jawdropper ending you have never, ever, ever read before, in a concoction that could only happen in Rio. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.