Phillippe Diederich

A fast-paced YA novel about four Mexican-American teenagers from Houston, a '59 Chevy Impala, and a murder that changes their lives forever. Flaco isn’t the kind of kid who gets in trouble. He doesn’t want to give his mom or his aunt Ana Flor any grief—they’ve had enough since his cousin Carlos died serving in Iraq. But he finds a whole lot more trouble than he bargained for when he and his friends Tiny, Magaña, and Susi ride the bus from their Houston neighborhood to Diamond Park to buy a used car. And not just any car—a 1959 Impala convertible, a dream car. The transaction gets complicated fast, and Susi ends up with a knife in her hands, covered in blood. When Tiny has to disappear to avoid ICE, Flaco and Magaña head south in the Impala to set things right. In a wildly impetuous move, the two boys cross into Mexico hunting for a trafficker named Anaconda, the man they believe is the real killer, to clear Susi’s name. In a breathtaking, seat-of-your-pants adventure they manage to kidnap him but in the process they discover how little they ever actually understood about what really happened in Diamond Park.

Diamond Park

The bittersweet odyssey of a boy coming of age in a landscape broken by drugs, crime, and corruption.

Playing for the Devil's Fire

A moving middle-grade mystery about a boy dealing with long-repressed memories of his father as he learns about his Mexican and Haitian heritage while spying on a mysterious stranger during the first weeks of COVID lockdown. Lalo Lesperance lives with his older brother and Mexican American mother in a low-income apartment building in Fort Myers. They moved there from a subdivision after the family lost Lalo’s Haitian American father. At school, Lalo is known as the boy who can’t remember anything and needs special help in all his classes. But when the first COVID lockdown hits, he finds himself in a friendship of convenience with Vivi, a Mexican American kid his age who gets perfect grades and who never gave him a second thought when they were in school. Vivi’s abuela watches the kids while their mothers work long shifts as nurses at a clinic slammed by COVID. As Lalo navigates his much smaller pandemic world, he discovers his apartment building has its own mysteries, like a sinister stranger in an old RV and a storage closet full of junk, including an old radio that just might hold the key to remembering why Lalo’s family moved to the apartment and what happened to his father.

Lalo Lespérance Never Forgot

A Cuban-American travels to Havana searching for a secret recipe where he finds love and the truth about his father.

Phillippe Diederich

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