Bruno Blog

He took four steps and saw her. A girl. Eighteen or nineteen years, at most. Thin and with the hair turned and long to the chest. Almond eyes, fleshy lips, very marked cheekbones and straight nose and much finer than most black ones he had seen. Beautifulness… With all the panic that shook his face. The butchery began just below the sternum.Matinada, Zona Franca of Barcelona. On the radio of Lluís Artigas’ patrol car there is a 10-50 sound: Someone has picked it up. The victim turns out to be a brutally murdered Nigerian girl following what turns out to be a voodoo ritual. Artigas, a burned agent suspected of being corrupt, will undertake an unexpected search for those responsible for this crime. On the night of Damballah, a magically written novel, with the narrative pulse of the classics of the genre, with the ironic tone and harsh, cynical sometimes, incisive always of the best narrators of the black novel, more in the street, Jordi Solé shows us a skimmed and fatty Barcelona for which they pulsate characters in which we do not always reparate, headed by a policeman, Lluís Artigas, called to become a mythical antihero, and confirms us as one of the most excellent voices in our narrative landscape.

Marcela Pieldelobo is not easy to deal with. Born in Biescas, a small village in the Aragonese Pyrenees, she has been an inspector for the National Police Force in Pamplona for the past decade. A woman who is excessive in her habits and affections, and in the original tattoo that curls around her body and which hardly anyone knows about. She is convinced that orders are open to interpretation, that there are things that you need to keep to yourself and that closed doors can be unlocked if you know how to open them. Even if you do not have a court order. Now the past, in the form of an abusive father who reappears after the death of his mother, is knocking furiously at her door, but Marcela has more urgent things to attend to, such as the case of a baby abandoned in a lonely car park and a damaged rental car with no trace of the driver, but with blood stains and tracks from the car… When the clues lead to a well-known company owned by one of the most traditional and influential local families, her superiors decide to take her away from the case… But Marcela, true to her principles and her instinct, insists on going further, even at the cost, now, of her own life.

Martí Cots Saleta, better known as Rambo, has been harassing the various police forces of La Cerdanya, both on the border and in the area, for almost three decades. It is very true that almost half of the years he has spent entering and leaving Catalan prisons, where he paid for his small crimes. But being free he has earned the reputation of being an impossible fugitive to capture: invisible in the eyes of the police, he was capable of living outdoors, overcoming the harsh winter nights in the Pyrenees, hiding in inhospitable mountains, while doing minor robberies… Because the Cerdanya was his kingdom.

David Marín makes a particular homage to the most classic black genre. The volume also includes four stories in the black and police genres published by the author.

Appletown, New York’s Lleida neighborhood, is once again a dangerous place. The fight between the two rival mafia clans, the Torra and the Vidal, has worsened. Detective Johnny Peregrí left the neighborhood some time ago, but he will receive an assignment that he cannot refuse and that will take him back to the dark alleys of Appletown, where gangsters speak with a Lleida accent, jazz mixes with “garrotins” and a man’s life is worth the same as a plate of snails in a can. And in Lleida, the appearance of a corpse in the Segarra-Garrigues canal on the day of its inauguration and the arrival of a mysterious poetess from the group of the irrepressible will change the life of the young Marcel Riera, a regional chronicler for the city’s poor newspaper and an undecided aspiring novelist. Appletown is a novel that plays on several planes of reality, where nothing is what it seems and where the characters seek their place in the world.

A spy thriller based on the real 20th century story of the CIA and women during the Cultural Cold War.

When his flight is overbooked, Manuel Servera, a young writer from Mallorca, is forced to spend New Year’s Eve of 1989 at Hotel Metropole. He will meet Ms. Katharina Fürst, who on that very special night of 1942 managed to travel to the United States carrying vital information: a list of Nazi spies of capital importance to the Allies. Thus, the young writer discovers a whole unknown world in which this hotel in the heart of Lisbon becomes a nest of Nazi and Allied spies and Jews who hoped to escape Europe, as Portugal remains neutral In World War II, and Ms Fürst is a coveted asset for all. The novel invites us to dive into contemporary history as well as shedding light on the role of the CIA and women spies in the so-called Cultural Cold War.