Book of the Day

From the review

Ulises Linares makes his living out of a mailbox, writing to lonely women who can't tell a love letter from a loan application. He's handsome enough that it's worked for years, and vain enough to know the shelf life on that is short. So he arrives in the small, humid town of Puerco Ahogado with a plan already half-built: charm the boardinghouse owner, marry her, empty her accounts, disappear. What he doesn't plan for is Inés, the niece who runs the house in every way but name and wants out of it badly enough to help him rob her own aunt. Moreno-Garcia has always been good at making a house feel like it's keeping score, and this one does exactly that. Rooms that used to hold a wealthier family now hold resentment instead, and every meal, every visit from a nosy neighbor, every locked door carries the weight of what the family used to be before the Revolution and a fever season took it from them. Perla, the supposed mark, is written with more architecture than either of the younger schemers realizes. She's not the sad spinster Ulises has sized her up as, and the novel takes real pleasure in letting the reader see that before he does.