Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. Biggest city in the Dominican Republic, and the biggest city in the Caribbean too, with just over a million people. Once upon a time of course a possession of the Spanish Empire and from the 1930s to the 1960s infamously under the control of the Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo. And, as anywhere where rich tourists congregate there’s some crime writing too….
Let’s start with a big beast and a big subject – Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania’s own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo’s reign. It’s 1961 and Trujillo’s decadent inner circle (which includes Urania’s soon-to-be disgraced father) are enjoying the luxuries of privilege while the rest of the nation lives in fear and deprivation. In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa eloquently explores the effects of power and violence on the lives of both the oppressors and those they victimized. And sorry, spoiler alert, of course Trujillo was assassinated in May 1961 in Santo Domingo. But few novels dissect the intersections of political corruption, machismo, and power like The Feast of the Goat, and I guess the Nobel committee agreed.
Let’s look at a couple of Santo Domingo-set series. A.J. Sidransky is the author of the Forgiving series featuring detectives Tolya Kurchenko and Pete Gonzalvez that all set light on the Dominican Republic’s past. Set in Washington Heights and the Dominican Republic. Book one, Forgiving Maximo Rothman (2013), opens on an autumn night in New York, the lives of two men born decades and continents apart collide when a man is found bludgeoned in his Washington Heights apartment. While investigating the crime, Detective Kurchenko comes across the dead man’s diaries that span Hitler’s Europe to the decaying Soviet Empire of the 1970s, and the little-known history of Sosúa, a Jewish settlement in the jungles of the Dominican Republic. Book two is Forgiving Stephen Redmond (2014), Detectives Kurchenko and Gonzalvez find something between a skeleton and a mummy in a double-breasted suit, Fedora still perched on his head. Who is this man? How long has he been here? And does it all go back to Trujillo’s iron-fisted Dominican Republic. And finally, in Forgiving Mariela Camacho (2015) Gonzalvez and Kurchenko doubt a suicide verdict on a corpse and follow a trail that leads through the cold streets of Soviet Moscow, the hot sands of the Judean Hills, the dark clubs of New York City’s underworld and finally the slums of the Dominican Republic. All in all the Forgiving series is a pretty good introduction to the D.R.’s modern history.
The Cemetery of Swallows (2014) is by the French author Jean-Denis Bruet-Ferreol, who writes under the pseudonym Mallock (and translated by the fantastic publisher Europa). Manuel Gemoni travels to the Dominican Republic to kill a man. When questioned by police, he can only explain his bizarre actions by saying, “I killed him because he had killed me.” Unable to comprehend why an ordinary family man with no history of violent behaviour would go to such lengths to kill a man he didn’t even know, Police Commissioner Amédée Mallock investigates moving from the snow-covered streets of Paris to the tropical jungles of the Dominican Republic and the snow-covered streets of Paris.
A few more Santo Domingo-set novels:
- John Keyse-Walker’s Santo Domingo Stakeout (2024) is set in 1965 with private investigator Henry Gore just wants to stay drunk in Santo Domingo. But when a Cuban exile winds up dead Henry has to put the bottle down and pick up his former trade. Book two of the Cuban Noir series after Havana Highwire (2022), which both have great covers, by the way.
- Barry Jay Freeman’s Assassination in Santo Domingo (2021) is the story of Raphael Trompero, a narcissist with autocratic ambitions and a corrupt mentality, who is elected president of the country in furtherance of a nefarious plan by Iran to gain influence in Central America. When Trompero outlives his usefulness to Iran, the Iranians decide to kill and replace him with an Iranian general. As their plan unfolds, Ari Stern, an aging Mossad agent, his wife, Leah, and their close American friends, the Bensons, arrive in the Dominican Republic for their winter vacation. Chaos ensues.
- Love and Death in the Dominican Republic (2023, a Love and Death Mystery & Political Espionage Novel book nine) by Hal Graff finds Harold Gatewood holing up in the D.R. mourning the death of his Venezuelan lover, tired of dealing with death threats from a deranged serial killer, scouting for baseball players and still doing a little spying – his former trade. And then he gets a mission – disrupt drug shipments from the Colombian cartels to the Dominican Republic.
- John W Mulally’s A Dominican Republic Wedding (2014) features Secret Service Agent Tom Gleason and his fiancé having destination wedding in the Dominican Republic. But his bride reads about a small ocean-side village near their wedding that accepted Jewish refugees during Hitler’s holocaust (remember Sosúa noted above?). But are all the supposed descendants of the refugees genuine? And could one of them be a murderer?
And a Santo Domingo true crime – Susan L Stewart’s Unjustly Accused (2017) about two Americans who went to the Dominican Republic and got car jacked. Problem is it looks like maybe the local cops were the car jackers. Within a week, they’re arrested, charged with drug trafficking and sentenced to one-to-three years in Nayajo, the Dominican Republic’s second largest prison with the possibility of another 20-years to follow!! No spoilers on this one!
And finally. I feel I don’t talk enough about Elmore Leonard in this column. I assume he’s just a CrimeReads God and doesn’t need any introduction or hyping to this audience. But I just read CM Kushins’ Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard (2025) and realised that despite his 60-year career, being “the Dickens of Detroit,”, the forty-five novels (westerns, noirs etc), the short stories and all the TV and movie spin-offs there might just be some who don’t and revere him. So let’s conclude with Cat Chaser (1982) when Florida motel owner George Moran revisits the Dominican Republic he left in a hurry and while being shot at before, to find a girl he left behind. Mary de Boya may be beautiful, but she’s also the wife of a former death squad general in exile with mob connections. Vintage, pure Elmore Leonard at his best and all on the mean streets of the Dominican Republic.
