Reviewed by: The Golden Havana Night: A Sherlock Homie Mystery by Manuel Ramos Marcus Embry Manuel Ramos. The Golden Havana Night: A Sherlock Homie Mystery. Arte Público, 2018. 239p. From Michael Nava to Lucha Corpi, the detective/mystery novel has provided Chicana/os a literary vehicle with which to revisit not only a history well-remembered but especially the unfulfilled promises of that historical past. Much of Latinidad is built around the backward glance of Benjamin’s Angel of History, and digging around in the present to find the ruins of el Movimiento are what Chicana/o detectives do particularly well. Many of the novels, like Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque, function as local color to bring Southwestern cities and peoples to mainstream attention without pandering to the general public’s problematic need to read Latinidad through folkloric nostalgia or magical realism. Manuel Ramos not only writes mystery novels. The now retired Denver lawyer also taught Chicana/o literature at Metropolitan State University in Denver, and his literary acumen is evident in his novels. His first works featuring Luis Móntez explored different aspects of how the dreams and promises of el Movimiento remain unfulfilled; the characters are middle-aged activists still committed to the cause, but trapped in a late capitalism that commodifies their accomplishments as testament to the liberal goodness of a system that continues to oppress them. These novels also present a Latinx Denver missing in most media representations, a multicultural Denver last seen in John Fante’s 1938 Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Perhaps Ramos’s two most “literary” works are Blues for the Buffalo (1997), in which the mystery facing Móntez is to unravel the legacy of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the 1970’s Chicano novelist who disappeared into Mexico, and King of the Chicanos (2010), that portrays Rudolfo “Corky” González. After Buffalo, Ramos retired Móntez and wrote Noir novels exploring the urbanization of Denver, a process that continues to destroy the city’s rich cultural heritage. His novels treat the most contemporary issues of Latinidad, making them very useful not only for teaching about an elided Latinidad in Denver, but also for tracking the changes in Latinx literature. The Golden Havana Night, A Sherlock Homie Mystery continues the story arc of a new investigator, Gus Corral, from Desperado: A [End Page 335] Mile High Noir (2013). Corral’s Denver is very different than Móntez’s Denver. Urbanization has destroyed the traditional neighborhoods where Móntez lived and worked. Where the earlier novels feature Luis Móntez, an aging lawyer with street credentials from el Movimiento, Gus is much younger, illustrating the change in generations in the twenty-first century. What he knows of el Movimiento is marginal, his street credentials consisting of an older sister who is a committed Chicana activist and his own status as an ex-con learning to redeploy his skillset. In previous novels, Ramos considered connections between Colorado, California, Mexico, and other regions in the southwest. Though the novels never make the claim, they now move within the boundaries of an expanded Aztlán, the “homeland” of the Chicana/o people. In the last decade or so, the boundaries of Latinx literature have not only expanded geographically, but many books, like Achy Obejas’s Ruins (2009), focus on the forgotten but constant presence of Latinidad in all things United Statesian. The Golden Havana Night enters this complicated twenty-first century of a globalized Latinidad when Corral is whisked off to Cuba to represent a Cuban professional baseball player and his family’s interests. In the world of Chicana/o mystery novels, Ramos’s expansion to Cuba is much like Eric Garcia’s third volume in his dinosaur detective series, Hot and Sweaty Rex (2006). Garcia’s detective arrives in Miami and is immediately told he doesn’t belong there because he is different, if yet the same. The novel, in other words, explores the boundaries within Latinidad, the boundaries among a vast number of sometimes very different people who are all, nevertheless, Latinx. Because The Golden Havana Night is about a Colorado Rockies baseball player, Ramos sums up the Denver sporting scene and its various manias eloquently, masterfully...