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Nola Céspedes doesn't do relationships. The entertainment-writer-turned-crime-reporter at the center of the mystery novel Hell or High Water, has always found love and romance, well, mysterious.

Not that she avoids men. Just don't go looking for her profile on Match.com, eHarmony or How About We? Instead, Nola confides, "I hang around the soccer fields and pick up hondureños and guatemaltecos for quick and dirty assignations. No strings, no romance, no meeting anybody's family… and dreaming up some bullshit future together."

The hard, unsentimental, 27-year-old reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune is the creation of Joy Castro. The Miami-born author lent her character her own Cuban background, but that's where the similarities end. They're nothing alike.

"I'm super conscientious about everything I say," Castro said by phone from Lincoln, Nebraska, where she teaches literature in the English and ethnic studies departments at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Nola's mouthy. She doesn't think before she speaks."

Nola gets loud with her appearance, too. She dresses in "blouses too snug, too red," lays on the eyeliner in thick strokes, and wears heels, plum lip gloss, and hoop earrings she can slide her wrist through. She looks, as she herself says, like a Cuban Charlie's Angel.

Castro's challenge? "Showing Nola's self-destructiveness but wanting people to like her so they won't shut the book and stop reading."

Hell or High Water, published in 2012, follows Nola as she covers a feature story on registered sex offenders who fell off the grid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Laid out as a series of creepy interviews with ex-con sexual predators, the book was recently honored with a Latino International Book Award. Actress Zoe Saldana and her production team have optioned the book. They're currently pitching studios a treatment for a film or a TV series.

The second book in the series, Nearer Home, out this July, finds Nola stumbling onto a sex-crime scene in which her former journalism teacher is the victim.

Castro said she's always been a fan of the mystery genre. As a kid, she read the Bobbsey Twins series and Sherlock Holmes. "I loved the element of figuring out the puzzle," she said.

Later, as a grad student earning a masters and PhD in literature, reading mysteries was a way to take a much needed break from her academic work. It was during this time that she also began writing short stories of her own.

A story she submitted to the Mid-American Review became her first published piece. The autobiographical story about a young, single mother living in poverty was admittedly her own story with just the names changed. She remembered thinking, "I'm participating in literature. I'm not just writing footnotes to it."

When she shared the news with her Cuban grandmother, Castro recalled her saying, "That's nice. But let me know when you get something in Redbook."

She never wrote for the magazine. Though Castro did stop changing the names and focused on writing what has become a series of critically well-received nonfiction books—The Truth Book, a family memoir published in 2005 about being the adoptive daughter of Jehovah's Witnesses, and Island of Bones, a collection of personal essays for which she returned to that first published story, and re-inserted the real names and factual details. The title, "Edging," remains the same.

Though her mystery novels can be a terrific, tough read—dark, violent, and not to mention the havoc they'll wreck on your bedtime as you're compelled to read into the night—Castro said, "My family is just glad I'm not writing another memoir." The themes don't faze them. "Nobody has sat me down to do an intervention."

Castro said that when she sat down to write the first book, there was never a question about putting a Latina character at the center of the story. Though Nola gets told throughout the narrative that she looks like J.Lo or like "that girl Alec Baldwin was dating in 30 Rock," Castro said she never modeled her character on anyone. "Nola is her own thing."