The fiendishly clever mystery in Frei Betto's Hotel Brasil plays straight to the reader's blind spot, and the hotel provides a delightful register of guests and residents as suspects and potential victims.
The heart of Betto's story is motorbike-riding Professor Candido, who volunteers at a local center to help homeless street children. Educated to be a priest, Candido ends up sheltering a runaway girl as the breakout of a hundred street kids from a correction facility collides with the investigation of a murdered hotel resident. In scrupulously lean prose, with exactly the right details, Betto--a political activist and Dominican friar jailed by Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s--brings to life the hotel's residents, including a political aide with a thirst for power, a madam and a pretty housecleaner who dreams of being a telenovela star. One by one, they are grilled by the pompous, determined police inspector, eager to solve the murder before the press does. But no one solves this mystery except the reader.
Hotel Brasil comes at you in short little bullets of narrative, each with its own title, sometimes no more than a paragraph or two long. The odd technique works. Alternately comic, insightful and harrowing in equal proportions, Betto is a thorough entertainer, painting a Rio de Janeiro of road accidents and shoeshine boys, kidnappings and murderous neighborhood mobs, topping it all off with a horribly satisfying ending--not to mention a glue-sniffing, revolver-toting 12-year-old street girl who threatens to walk away with the story. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.