from Dead Men Cast No Shadows

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Sergio Ramírez

One of the most influential voices in Spanish-language letters today, Sergio Ramirez (Masatepe, Nicaragua, 1942) is a writer, journalist, professor, and former Vice President (1985-90) of Nicaragua. Among his many books, the novel Margarita, está linda la mar (1998; Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, 2007) received the Premio Alfaguara de Novela. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize.

Ramírez’s latest books are the trilogy featuring as their protagonist Inspector Dolores Morales, a hero of the Sandinista guerrillas’ victory over Nicaragua’s brutal Somoza dictatorship. Morales limps badly because he lost a leg during the revolution and uses a prosthesis and a cane. In the first novel, The Sky Weeps for Me, Morales brings down two drug-cartel leaders, but loses his job due to government corruption; in the second, No One Weeps for Me Now, Morales opens a private-detective agency and exposes a Managua industrialist’s sexual abuse of his college-age stepdaughter; he is ultimately exiled to Honduras. The third novel’s first chapter, excerpted below, begins as Morales and his friend Serafín (a/k/a “Rambo”) sneak back into Nicaragua. The fugitives have no idea that they are returning to Nicaragua right before the government unleashes a violent attack against protesters in April 2018. Dead Men Cast No Shadows is forthcoming from McPherson & Company.