"Set in 1956, Atkinson’s rollicking debut neatly captures the personality and uproarious lifestyle of an American literary icon. When Key West fisherman Peter Cuthbert, a friend of Ernest "Papa" Hemingway, gets harpooned to death and the local police don’t seem to care, Hemingway, who’s suffering from writer’s block and feeling like "a big, fake water buffalo con artist," decides to find Cuthbert’s killer. The Nobel Prize winner’s daring quest takes him to Batista’s impoverished Cuba, where he meets such luminaries as high-living mobster Meyer Lansky and even Fidel Castro in the revolutionary’s mountain hideaway. Atkinson deftly mixes fact and fiction with graphic sex and violence in a mystery sure to please Hemingway aficionados." -- Publishers Weekly

"If Edna Ferber can become a fictional sleuth, shouldn’t he-man Papa have been solving crimes long ago? Making up for lost time, Hemingway takes a page out of Sam Spade’s book when he learns that a drinking buddy has turned up in Key West’s harbor impaled by an antique harpoon. (Spade felt that when your partner was killed, you had to do something; Hemingway feels the same about derelict fellow boozers.) By setting his story in Key West and Havana in 1956, first-novelist Atkinson gives us Hemingway on the verge of serious decline: the booze taking its toll, the writing stalled, the paranoia that would eventually lead to his suicide beginning to assert itself. All that gives the tale a nice psychodramatic edge, but the mystery itself is perfectly satisfying, too, as Hemingway jumps from Key West to Havana, dodging CIA stooges and assorted gangsters and even spending a drunken evening chugging rum with a couple of revolutionaries named Fidel and Che."
-- Booklist

“In Michael Atkinson’s Hemingway Deadlights, a world-famous and world-weary Hemingway seeks his standby cure for writer’s block: becoming part of a hell of an adventure that he can put down on paper.  Post-Nobel, stymied by the murder of a Key West drinking buddy--the weapon is a harpoon--he starts an investigation that takes him to 1950s Cuba and back, facing down local cops, international smugglers, the FBI, CIA, Batista’s henchmen, Meyer Lansky, Che Guevara, and Castro. Atkinson, never losing sight of the accident-prone Hemingway’s womanizing, risk-taking legend, scrutinizes the man’s politics and loyalties with comic flair. Right from the start, you can smell the rum, lime, perfume, and danger on the salt air." 
-- A.J. Zerries, author of The Lost Van Gogh