Bruno Blog

In a wintry Barcelona, Jaume Fuster returns to the city to join up the Homicide Unit of the Mossos de Esquadra, the Catalan police. And as soon as the protagonist arrives to his new destination, will be involved in a high complex case with a beheaded policeman. Behind the murder, a plan plotted by the Catalan bourgeoisie in alliance with the extreme rightwing to kill the FC Barcelona president. Prostitutes, hit men and journalists complete this gallery of characters that shows the putrefaction of our society.

In a Barcelona where property’s speculators can do anything and the institutions seem to be more interested in hiding some of the most recent incidents, a crime that seems to be absurd – the death of an old man – will become a headache for inspector Oscar Vidal, from the Homicide section. Above all, when some ghosts of the past begin to appear during the investigation, as an unexpected wife, forty years younger than the victim, or when the principal suspect disappears. Oscar Vidal, who is not living his best moment, will have to face his own prejudices, and discover something about himself, in order to solve the case. Because it seems logical to think that in a city where each year there are more tourists and immigrants, some neighbourhoods life in mistrust and tension with them.

Two stories that entwines and mixes up in a plot that takes many centuries.

Nowadays: Beatriu and Enric find out that one of their University partners, Ricard, specialized in Medieval History, has been murdered. In his room they find, written in the wall, a paragraph of the Bible.In 1348, in Poblet, Aloi de Monbrai discovers that there are dying many people because of the plague. The visit of Pere el Cerimoniós and the strange death of the queen would lead to an investigation… seven centuries after.

Written with Joan Bruna.

Andreas – a humble tourist guide – is hired by an enigmatic woman called Solstice Bloomberg to go with her to Jerusalem. Once there, Solstice will reveal him the real cause of her trip to the holy city: recover Judas Iscariot’s old will, handwritten by the apostle himself, before it comes into light to the public and reveals fantastic facts. One of them tells that from the thirty coins he received to betray Jesus, only seven remained, and passed through generations along History until turn into powerful talismans to everyone who owns them. Andreas has no choice but to collaborate with Solstice to find the coins, which were widely spread. The only clues they will have will be each of the seven parts that compose Judas’ legacy, which explain where they are hidden and how to recover them. United States, France or Japan will be some of the sceneries they will have to visit to find them, but of course neither Andreas nor Solstice are the only ones who want the treasure… Someone else searches it and will not doubt to use all the necessary resources – including murder – to get it first, in this race against the clock. A novel riddled with secrets, enigmas and mysteries, full of action and dangers that will show us a new and disturbing view about Judas.

The ten stories that make up “Títulos robados” are, no doubt, sad stories, like Monterroso often says the good stories are. In them, ten first-person narrators show us their strangeness before the world, their profound ignorance of human nature, their despair or resignation. They steal titles for their stories from other books or other stories and show us a moment of their lives in which their desires for change succumb to feelings of failure. The end, often premature, of a struggle, the assumption of its uselessness.

An old man who does not want to return to a home town frozen in time in “Tale of Two Cities”; a man who discovers, because of an unfortunate sequence of random events, that the woman who he lives with is a stranger in “Broken Mirror”; the son traveling to Paris to discover that his father has ceased to be a match for him in “Paris never ends”; the teenager who must take care of his alcoholic grandfather as if he was the old pirate at the Admiral Benbow Inn on “The Island Treasure”.

A gallery of lonely people trapped in situations that they can only be resigned to accept, but do not understand anything.