Dark Echoes of the Past

The first novel by multiple-award-winning Chilean author Ramón Díaz Eterovic to be translated into English—a landmark event for fans of crime fiction.

Private investigator Heredia spends his days reading detective novels; commiserating with his cat, Simenon; and peering out over the Mapocho River from his Santiago apartment. The city he loves may be changing, but Heredia can’t stop chasing the ghosts of the past. This time, they’ve come to him…

Virginia Reyes’s brother, an ex–political prisoner of dictator Augusto Pinochet, was killed in an apparent robbery. Yet nothing of value was taken. The police have declared the case closed, but Virginia suspects that things aren’t quite as they appear and turns to Heredia for help. Heredia couldn’t agree more—but he can’t shake the feeling that there’s something Virginia’s not telling him.

Heredia knows this is not a simple crime. His investigation proves it. Drawn back into a world where murderers nest, secrets are to kill and die for, and Pinochet’s legacy still casts a long, dark, and very threatening shadow, it’s all Heredia can do to crawl out of it alive.

Ramón Díaz Eterovic is one of the best-known writers of crime stories in Chile, where the adventures of his private investigator Heredia are enormously popular. They’ve been adapted into the graphic-novel series Heredia Detective and a TV series, Heredia y Asociados. In 2009, Díaz Eterovic became the subject of the documentary El rostro oculto en las palabras (The Hidden Face in Words).

Díaz Eterovic is also the author of The Fires of the Past and The Music of Solitude and has published forty novels, short-story and poetry collections, graphic novels, and children’s books. He has received 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 numerous countries, including Chile, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Argentina, Mexico, France, Holland, and Germany.

Díaz Eterovic lives in Santiago, Chile, with his wife, Sonia, and their three children.

Patrick Blaine is an associate professor of Latin American cultural studies at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He earned his MA and PhD in comparative literature from the University of Washington. He specializes in Chilean and Argentinian literature and film and has written extensively on these subjects.

In 2000, Blaine moved to Santiago, Chile, where he taught English at the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura and worked as a commercial translator and interpreter. Before returning to the United States, he studied in the Universidad de Chile’s graduate literature program. Blaine frequently returns to Chile with his wife, Mónica, and son, Sebastián.

As a translator, Blaine has published English translations of essays by Angel Guido and Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, as well as a Spanish translation of his own essay on Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. Dark Echoes of the Past is his first novel translation.