María Angélica Bosco, Death Going Down (1954).
Good Reads meta-data is 160 pages, rated 3.10 by 379 litizens.
DNA: Argentine.
Verdict: Meh.
Tagline: Not sure I care.
Winter in Buenos Aires is wet and windy, when a resident of a small apartment block returns home late at night from the pub, well and truly tanked, to find the lift occupied by…a corpse. Befuddled he does some stupid things.
There follows a police procedural confined largely to this building where each apartment occupies a floor. Several of the residents are European flotsam and jetsam from the war. The corpse was not a resident and yet seemed to have had a key to the front door. Does the European past hold the key to this mystery. Doh!
I chose it for the setting but, well, I got little of post war Buenos Aires since the story unfolds mainly in the building. The translation was cryptic, or perhaps that is the original, and this reader found it hard to follow and hard to develop an interest in, or to keep straight, the characters. Ergo, be your own judge.
It is one of eighteen or so in a series from this writer who is described as the Agatha Christie of Argentina. I couldn’t see why. But then one of the other Good Readers compared her Raymond Chandler and that seemed idiotic for even a Good Reader.