Bruno Blog

In Ligácia, a small country in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, Guillem Desclot, a mature and solitary writer, discovers some long-forgotten documents among his own papers. These documents take him back to his youth, marked by the presence of Evelyn Moore, whom he hasn’t heard from since. In the search of her trail, he returns to the past and the circumstances that surrounded a difficult period. What happened to Evelyn Moore? Why did she never return to pick up the documents she entrusted to Guillem? Why does nobody remember her? Guillem enters a strange world: childhood memories, secret societies, books that never existed and friends who refuse to remember their own past. The description of a limited and mean cultural class, the flasbacks that take us to the origin of the story and the splendid construction of the plot make “La desaparición de Evelyn” a passionate novel that will excite and surprise the reader until the last page.

Since her divorce, Irene has felt trapped, and started to see a psychotherapist, Dr. Alba, a specialist in lucid dreams. Dr. Alba suggests Irene take a journey to her inner self to try and understand her past, clarify doubts concerning her current situation and find a solution for the future. Irene visits the castle of 9 mirrors, a mysterious mansion beyond her conscience only accessible through her dreams. Irene has to find nine mirrors in the castle. Each mirror reflects an aspect of her character with which she is not familiar. This process of self-discovery becomes Irene’s most thrilling adventure from which she will learn the value of life and dreams and find the key to her healing.

Summer. Two telephone calls break the stillness of the night, setting off two beginnings which spring from darkness and may lead to two different endings: Bruno’s girlfriend has just died in a car accident. Some minutes later, another phone call brings back to him the existence of Julia, his daughter, whom he had sworn never to meet in his life, now demanding him from the other corner of the world. Julia is full of whys. She wants to know. Then come the secrets, confessions, and the meetings too… As Bruno composes this intimate long-distance father’s ballad to Julia, five women’s voices —grandmother Lena, Jasmine, Irene, Clara and aunt Luna— will portray along the lines of this letter the generosity, magnanimity and the boundaries of love’s power. “El tiempo del corazón” is the opportunity that Fate affords to a man to trust in his own life and truth, asking in return the highest price: to learn to bless the loss of the dearest ones. In order to accomplish that, Bruno will have to face the risky adventure of discovering himself, forgiving himself and revealing to a little stranger the most disturbing and frightened corners of his silences.

Lònia Guiu is a private detective. She is a stubborn feminist, independent, rebellious and full of contradictions. Her anxiety and dreads drive her to become a detective, who makes mistakes, and this often makes her really angry. After her cases in “Study in Lilac” and “Antipodes”, this time Lònia must face a sad and repugnant case that will take her from Barcelona to Cologne, in the North of Germany, and from there to her natal Majorca, where she will re-live both good and bad memories of her childhood. The story is set in 1958. Joanna, forty eight, is trying on her wedding dress. We will later be told this is not her first wedding, and that her fiancée is much younger than herself. We will also learn that this wedding is an act of revenge. This revenge also implies a scandal that all the guests know about, but that no one dares to voice. In this succession of intriguing chapters, that are skillfully crafted, Maria-Antònia Oliver builds the book´s structure aroung the life of a Majorcan woman, in which tension escalates up to the surprising ending.

Lonia Guiu, the wisecracking, hardboiled Catalan private eye of “Study in Lilac”, returns in this story of islands, large and small. One island is Australia, in the Antipodes, where Lonia is Working for friends on sailboat and investigating the disappearance of blonde, drugged-out heiress. The other island is Majorca, Lonia’s –and the heiress’s- Mediterranean home. A fast-paced thriller that careens from matrimonial agencies to tourist hotels and keeps Lonia, her mysterious Australian lover and her steadfast employee Quim on the razor edge of excitement.

Press Reviews: “A delightfully different detective” – Toronto Globe and Mail

“Reminiscent of Sara Paretsky‘s V.I. Warshawski, though more political and earthier.” – The Drood Review of Mystery