In the following brief essay, Ana Maria Hernandez describes The Agüero Sisters, Garcia's second novel, as a "whydunit" using satire, metaphor, and a variety of character narrations (the Aguero sisters, their daughters, and a third person narrator) to unfold the mystery of a family murder/ suicide.

Cristina Garcia's second novel opens in the mystical Zapata Swamp on the southern coast of Cuba, a place long imbued with mystery and magic in Cuban folklore and Afro-Cuban ritual. It is there that Ignacio Aguero, a renowned naturalist, murders the mysterious Blanca, his wife and research associate. Two years later, he commits suicide, leaving no explanatory note. The novel thus becomes a whydunit, as in the case of Garcia Marquez's Cronica de una muerte anunciada. The reader approaches the story from multiple points of view, attempting to elucidate the reasons for the murder/suicide and its effect on the...