Havana in the 1930s: a white Art Deco casino blazing with light, American millionaires in cream dinner jackets, Cuban officials with diamond pins, and upstairs behind a locked mahogany door a beautiful young heir lies dead with a knife wound below the heart — Julian Ashcroft, son of a shipping magnate, has been stabbed during a private card game in a room locked from the inside with only his father and his father's partner present, no weapon, no witness, and no explanation; as Veronica Lakewood and Captain Hastings follow a black sequin that belonged to no one's gown, a glove scented with orange blossom on a service stair, a private ledger of blackmail now missing, and a Cuban singer whose silence means more than her song, what begins as a locked-room puzzle becomes deeply personal when Veronica's own name appears in the dead man's book and the secrets of a Paris nightclub she thought she'd buried rise through the floorboards of a Havana casino; The Casino Estrella is an original Golden Age–style mystery about old debts, new cruelty, and the discovery that in Havana every crime arrives already wearing a disguise and the most dangerous secrets belong to the people who got out.