The Neighborhood

After A Discreet Hero (2015), Vargas Llosa stays on familiar Peruvian turf in this novel of intrigue and murder. A sleazy tabloid publisher is blackmailing Enrique Cardenas, a successful and influential mining engineer, with some compromising photos taken during an orgy with prostitutes. The publisher is brutally murdered, and Cardenas and another innocent victim, a senile former entertainer, are the suspects. The slain editor's successor daringly reveals that the assassination was discharged under the orders of the Doctor, the henchman of then president Alberto Fujimori (whom Vargas Llosa ran against in 1990), which brings about the downfall of the regime. In the meantime, Cardenas's wife is having an affair with his attorney's wife. The narration is fairly straightforward until Chapter 20, when Vargas Llosa indulges in one of his characteristic and long-lived techniques: the overlapping and interweaving of narrations across time.