Eliot Steil, the antihero at the centre of José Latour’s wonderful new mystery, was born in 1950 to a Cuban mother and an American father, a businessman in the sugar industry. Young Eliot and his mother were in Cuba when Castro came to power, trapping them there. His father remained in the U.S. but never sent for them and, after a while, stopped sending money or even communicating.

More than 30 years later, Steil, now a divorced English teacher in Cuba, is approached by an American stranger who tells him that he is there to fulfill Steil’s father’s deathbed wish: to help Steil escape from Cuba to the U.S. So Steil swims out to the man’s yacht, and they set a course for Florida. Then, miles from land, Steil’s saviour pushes him overboard. (Revealing this doesn’t spoil anything, as all of it happens in the book’s first chapter.)

The mild-mannered Steil makes it to America and begins obsessively tracking the man who tried to kill him at sea, the truth about his father, and, more than anything, some understanding of why these things have happened to him. To add to the challenge, some powerful people in the U.S. want to stop both him and his search.

Latour provides the reader with a native’s view of life in Cuba. His love for the warmth and romance of his homeland is evident, but he also reveals telling details of that country’s poverty and oppression, contrasting them with the awe and dismay with which Cuban émigrés view the plenty and waste of America.

Some readers may question the credibility of Steil’s transformation from meek and mild to cunning and violent. We can’t know what lurks in the heart of a man abandoned as a child by his father, who has lived his adult life as an outcast in his homeland and then gets left floating in the middle of the ocean, totally alone. These powerful triggers are explanation enough, and motivation for a rich, satisfying novel about a driven man.