Sonia Frey fears for her sanity. Her marriage ended in divorce after her husband tried to kill her. Added to this, an acid trip has disordered her senses – she can now ‘feel’ smells, ‘see’ sounds.
To escape these worries, she takes a job as a physiotherapist at a newly reopened hotel in a remote Alpine village in the Swiss Engadine. However, a series of unusual events throws her into disarray once more. The mystery deepens as she discovers a parallel to these occurrences in local folkloric tales of the supernatural. Can the legend of the Devil of Milan really be true? Or is the truth more sinister? Sonia’s mind, already under pressure from her strange sensory awareness, is stretched to breaking point by the climate of paranoia developing around her. This tightly plotted, intelligently written novel is an acute study of the shifting nature of identity and reality, as well as an engrossing mystery story with a thrilling denouement.
EuroCrime
9781905147526
£11.99
Water-Blue Eyes
Domingo Villar
Translated from the Spanish by Martin Schifino
Winner of the Brigada 21 Prize for best first crime novel
Winner of the Sintagma Prize
A rich literary mystery peppered with humour, Domingo Villar’s new suspense-filled novel combines a certain melancholy with the joys of music and white wine.
Amid the aroma of the sea and the Galician pines, a young saxophonist is found dead in his swanky flat overlooking the beach. The murder seems to have taken place after a sexual encounter with a lover: there are two glasses filled with gin in the living room, and the dead man, Luis Reigosa, is tied by the wrists to the headboard of the bed. But the way he was killed makes it impossible to obtain any more clues about his activities that night: his stomach, groin and thighs are horribly burned, and his genitals look hideously like a toasted cashew. The unusually cold-blooded and cruel murder is assigned to Leo Caldas, a disheartened police inspector still searching for his place in the world. The case unfolds between inviting nights at the jazz clubs and the tense, affected atmosphere of upper-class Vigo.
‘Villar never loses the attention of the reader’ El Cultural
‘A piece of hard-boiled crime fiction. In luminous prose Villar lets the Mediterranean space speak, setting his story in Galicia among the “fjord-like inlets known as rias … swaths of green land here and there … shielded from the pounding of the Atlantic by streamlined, white-sand islands”’ TLS
EuroCrime
9781905147762
£11.99
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