BLOOD IN THE CUT

A young Cuban American man just released from prison returns home only to stumble into a world of illegal hunting and murder.

You will need a strong stomach to enter the brutal world of game hunting, illegal slaughterhouses, and human violence depicted in Nodarse’s first novel. Set on the darkest edges of modern-day Miami, the book follows the path of Ignacio “Iggy” Guerra, who has just been released from prison after having been arrested for selling oxycodone he stole from his mother’s pharmacy. Now, three years later, Iggy is returning home to a working-class Cuban American neighborhood that is significantly different from what it was when he left. His beloved mother is dead, the victim of a hit-and-run driver. The pharmacy is gone. His angry, embittered father is drinking too much and drowning in debt. A shiny new competitor is threatening his father’s butcher shop, and when Iggy finds his father alone one night, covered in blood, he really begins to worry. What exactly is he butchering? His father won’t talk, but his connection to a shady big-game hunter leads Iggy into a dangerous mission in the Everglades—and to the truth about what happened to his mother. Nodarse creates an unsettling atmosphere and sheds some light on real Miami problems, the cost of gentrification among them, but the book’s overwhelming machismo doesn’t allow for much interesting character development. Villains talk like cartoon bad guys, and the question of how far Iggy will go for vengeance falls flat because the reader is never invested enough in his redemption to care. The various mysteries fueling the story aren’t all that hard to figure out, and a side plot involving a rogue animal activist develops too awkwardly to make much impact. Not even an impromptu street race through the Everglades can make up for the missteps.

A bloody, macho redemption story that never quite takes off.