Glastenbury, Vermont, 1936. Three women murdered in a single month, each with the same clean cut across the throat and a different piece of themselves missing.
A local constable who knows everyone in town and can't find the killer. A medical examiner who discovers something during an autopsy that frightens him enough to board a night train to Boston without telling anyone why.
He never arrives.
What follows is an investigation that moves on two tracks — a state detective sent from outside, methodical and unimpressed by appearances, and a journalist who arrives in disguise, asking questions no one else thought to ask.
Between them, they uncover a town that looks ordinary from every angle and is anything but.
Glastenbury's Secret is a classic mystery in the tradition of 1930s American noir, with the atmospheric dread of New England winter, a killer hiding in the most unexpected place, and a final revelation that reframes everything that came before it.
For readers who like their mysteries cold, their small towns unsettling, and their answers earned.
Ruben Alfons was born in San Carlos, Maldonado, Uruguay, on February 17, 1970.
His work moves between memory, everyday life, social observation and the darker corners of human nature. His poetry collections, including “Mi vida en 30 versos y una milonga maltrecha,” “Fragua y latido,” and “Ardence,” explore childhood, adulthood, love, conflict and the quiet battles people carry inside themselves.
In 2019, while living in Lima, Peru, he wrote his first novel, “La Aurora de Barranco,” a story about routine, friendship and the unexpected events that can alter an entire life.
His fiction later moved toward psychological suspense with “Steel Bleeding,” a thriller set in 1970s New England, and “Glastenbury’s Secret,” his second literary translation, which reimagines a classic mystery in 1930s Vermont.
He currently lives in Uruguay, where he continues writing poetry, novels and songs, drawn to the same subjects that have always shaped his work: memory, human contradictions and the secrets hidden beneath ordinary lives.