Angels & Loners

Private Investigator Heredia returns as multiple-award-winning author Ramón Díaz Eterovic sends the most iconic figure in Chilean crime fiction down a dark alley of lost love, corruption, and murder.

Private investigator Heredia has many phantoms—and one of his most haunting has come calling. Argentine investigative journalist Fernanda Arredondo, an old flame he loved and lost, needs to see him after saying goodbye years ago. All it takes is a single day for Heredia to lose her again when she’s found dead—an apparent suicide in a lonely hotel room in Santiago.

Heredia has more than his instincts to tell him that it was murder. He has clues. Like the suspicious death in the same hotel weeks before of a North American journalist specializing in uncovering covert military affairs. Both he and Fernanda were trailing an explosive story—chemical weapons tied to the Latin American arms industry—and they won’t be the last to die.

Now Heredia is following their secrets by infiltrating the most powerful and dangerous criminal network in Chile. Exposing it is Heredia’s business. Avenging Fernanda’s murder is personal. For a man with so few illusions left, surviving it is up to fate.

Ramón Díaz Eterovic is one of the best-known writers of crime stories in Chile, where his Detective Heredia books have been adapted into the graphic-novel series Heredia Detective and a TV series, Heredia y Asociados. The subject of the documentary El rostro oculto en las palabras (The Hidden Face in Words), Díaz Eterovic is the author of more than forty novels, including The Fires of the Past, The Music of Solitude, and Dark Echoes of the Past, the first Heredia novel to be translated into English, as well as short-story and poetry collections, and children’s books.

The recipient of the Gijón’s Salón Iberoamericano del libro Las Dos Orillas prize, the Chilean National Cultural Board Prize, the Santiago Municipal Book Prize, the Francisco Coloane National Narrative Prize, and the Altazor Arts Prize, his work has also been published in Chile, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Argentina, Mexico, France, Holland, and Germany.

Patrick Blaine, a literary translator and Latin American cultural studies scholar, is currently dean of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle (2010) specializing in the literature and film of Chile.

During 1998 and 1999, he lived and studied in San Sebastián, Spain, in the Basque Country. From 2000 to 2003 Blaine lived in Santiago, Chile, where he taught ESL and worked as a commercial translator and interpreter. During his final two years in Santiago, he studied in the graduate literature program of the Universidad de Chile.

Blaine has published English translations of Spanish essays by Ángel Guido and Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, and translated his own essay on Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán from English to Spanish. His published book-length translations include Dark Echoes of the Past, also by Ramón Díaz Eterovic.