Hotel Brasil

1. A colorful and witty mystery novel set in Rio, published in 2014, the year the soccer World Cup is held in Brazil and two years before the Olympics come to town.

2. Rio is the perfect backdrop with its dictatorships, drug wars, child gangs and violent policing tactics. The hotel residents reflect Brazilian society, multi-racial, with starkly contrasting backgrounds, and usually destitute.

3. A classical whodunit crime novel but really an opportunity for Frei Betto--Dominican friar, political prisoner in the 1970s under the dictatorship, union activist and then an adviser to President Lula da Silva--to describe Brazilian society, especially those at the edge, like the many street children in the novel, found on the beaches, in the favelas, and in prisons.

4. The novel is not Manichean: children are abused and hunted down but also addicted to drug dealing and violent crime. While being faithful to a suspenseful intrigue worthy of Ruth Rendell, the book tells the fascinating back stories of the hotel residents, all suspects and most eventual victims, such as the maid who dreams of making it in television soaps, and the female pimp who has survived incestuous rape.