Paradise Travel

If you’re in the mood for a moody noir — plot clean and tight, atmosphere thick with grime — then Colombian novelist Jorge Franco has a handsome book for you. The hero, Marlon, is a young man from Medellín whose new girlfriend, Reina, wants to sneak away to the U.S. Seducing and stealing, she leads him on an illegal trip, but when the two get separated in New York City, she makes no effort to find him. Marlon lucks into a job cleaning the toilet at a Colombian restaurant in Queens, tries to find her, and thinks about what he’ll do when he does. Paradise Travel is cinematic, its story jazzily fractured in the way of Pulp Fiction or The Limey. Both Reina and America make for haunting femmes fatales.