"The Transparency of Time sees the Cuban investigator pursuing a mystery spanning centuries of occult history" -- 2014. Mario Conde is facing down his sixtieth birthday: a failing body, a slower mind, and the ideals and failures of the Cuban Revolution swept away in favor of a new and newly cosmopolitan worship of money. Rescue comes in the form of a new case: an old Marxist turned flamboyant practitioner of Santería appears on the scene to engage Conde to track down a stolen statue of the Virgen de Regla-- a black Madonna. Conde must delve as far back as the Crusades in an attempt to uncover the true provenance of the statue.