Jose Pimienta and Ramon Valdez, two Cuban-American Marielitos, tool up one morning to visit Schnitzer Jewellers in an argument over gold chains. Before they leave, the city of Los Angeles has seen one of the bloodiest robberies in its history and a trail of corpses litters the store, including those of an old woman and a young girl. When Valdez elects to represent himself in the ensuing trial, Charles Morell is appointed as his court investigator to locate and question witnesses.

The Killing of the Saints is a debut for Havana born Abella, and one that refuses to stray too far from the bizarre and unusual. Taking as read the lie inherent in the Valdez defence, Morell is forced into a world he has all but left behind, facing down the demons in his own past and the true nature of immigration in the city of angels. The result plunges the novel into the murky and frighteningly zealous world of Old World belief, violence and the racial injustice at the heart of the American legal system.

Drawing favourable comparison with both Gabriel García Márquez and Elmore Leonard, the book belongs really to neither school, but owes something to both in the dense and impressive atmosphere it successfully creates about itself. The true worth of the novel is in painting a convincing portrait of a Los Angeles a million miles away from the bright lights and big city everyone knows and instead surfaces in a broken, racially divided town where the religious practices of the immigrants live on just as strongly as they did in their homelands.

The success of the novel is reliant upon Abella building his audience an authentic portrait of Santería as practised, or more precisely, of the kind of fanatical devotion that holds such sway with the people. Through it he injects Morell’s guilt over the small incident of corruption that forced him to relocate to the city and the ugly, tragic death of his father; Morell finding that as the case sucks him up so the reappearance of his dead parent in a seeming attempt to kill the son from beyond the grave begins to tip the investigator towards the edge of insanity.

What is less successful is Morell’s intensely physical affair with a witness he encounters along the way; the explicit affair detracts from the narrative flow, and more fatally infuses an element of misogyny in the narrator. Refreshingly, though, Abella is able to so undercut expectation and design that the climax when it comes, wrapped as it is inside a fairly conventional courtroom drama, leaves the reader continually trying to second guess the unpredictable outcome to major effect. It’s unfortunate that he feels the need for a postscript that bundles the intriguing, mystically tinged loose ends a little too tightly; a measure of ambiguity would have been welcome, but the degree of intelligence and invention on offer here make this an exhilarating debut.