Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets (USA 2025)

From the Publisher:
Third in the Miami mystery series featuring "spicy, sassy, and thoroughly modern" Cuban-American PI Lupe Solano, taking on a case that could make or break her (The Austin Chronicle).

In 1950s Havana, two men were successful business partners with everything to lose when Fidel Castro came to power. One fled and started over in Miami. The other ended up a political prisoner. And now the son of that prisoner has made his way to South Florida, ready to claim his promised legacy from the family that betrayed his.

When Luis Delgado comes to Lupe Solano's investigation agency, she's pretty sure that he can't afford her, but she's willing to listen. His tale of crossing to Florida on a makeshift raft, theft, and attempted murder implicates one of Miami's most powerful Cuban-American families. Going up against them -- and losing -- would destroy everything Lupe has built for herself. But she's never been afraid of risk. And now, in one of the hottest cities in the world, she'll find herself walking on thin ice...

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets. A Lupe Solano Mystery. Open Road Media, ISBN: 9798337202174 (August, 2025), eBook, 3 MB (ca. 438 p.), $9.99.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets (USA 1999)

From the Publisher:
In Bloody Secrets, Lupe Solano returns to work the case of a balsero - a refugee who escaped Cuba by raft. Although Lupe doesn't accept clients without a reference, she is intrigued by Luis's story: a drifter living in a flophouse in a dangerous neighborhood, he claims that one of Miami's prominent Cuban couples has swindled his family out of their fortune and arranged for his murder. Lupe is instantly drawn to Luis, who appears to be more interested in his family's honor than in the money that is rightfully his. She finds that she can't push him from her mind - brought up by a once aristocratic mother whose husband died in Castro's prison, he is the sort of man she might have ended up with had her family not succeeded in leaving Cuba in the first wave of immigration in the 1960s. But Luis's case is far more complicated than Lupe anticipates, when innocent people are killed, and when she finds that her feelings for her client are more than professional.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets. A Lupe Solano Mystery. Berkley Publishing Group, ISBN: 0425167798 (March, 1999), 324 p., $6.50.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets (USA 1998)

From the Publisher:
Miami P.I. Lupe Solano has been called "funny, sexy, and Miami-smart" by Nelson DeMille, and "an absolute joy" by The Miami Herald. Now the celebrated sleuth returns.

In a sweeping story that takes readers from the last days of Batista's Havana, to the Guantanamo Bay refugee camp, to Miami's high society, Lupe takes the case of a balsero-a refugee who escaped Cuba by raft. Luis is a drifter living in a flophouse, but he claims Miami's most prominent Cuban couple has robbed his family and arranged for his murder. Lupe is instantly drawn to Luis, and his sense of honor. But the case becomes troubling when innocent people are killed and when her feelings for her client become more than professional. A page-turning mystery, a remarkable glimpse into the lives of all strata of Cuban-American society, and a fascinating look into the moral quandaries an investigator faces, Bloody Secrets is Garcia-Aguilera's boldest achievement yet.

Carolina Garcia-Aguilera: Bloody Secrets. A Lupe Solano Mystery. Putnam's, ISBN: 0399143866 (February, 1998), 274 p., $23.95.