Death On A Galician Shore

One misty autumn dawn in a quiet fishing port in northwest Spain, the body of a sailor washes up in the harbour. Detective Inspector Leo Caldas is called in from police headquarters in the nearby city of Vigo to sign off on what appears to be a suicide. But details soon come to light that turn this routine matter into a complex murder investigation. Finding out the truth is not easy when the villagers are so suspicious of outsiders. As Caldas delves into the maritime life of the village, he uncovers a disturbing decade-old case of a shipwreck and two mysterious disappearances. Death on a Galician Shore is a chilling story of violence, blackmail and revenge that has enthralled readers across Europe...

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 affluent Vigo.

A brilliant new stand-alone crime thriller from Scotland's Crime Master Xavier (Xavi) Aislado is a gentle giant, half Spanish, half Scot, brought up in Edinburgh by his grandmother, Paloma Puig, a ferocious old lady whose grim brand of care sees him into his teens, until his father moves back to Spain, leaving him to grow up fast. His emergence into manhood is colourful, and eventful. After a short career as a professional footballer, he turns to journalism, and has a bloody introduction to the trade, as his first assignment ends in violent death. Inevitably, remorselessly, as his autobiography unfolds, Xavi's life and his love become entwined with his work, and he is immersed in tragedy, loss and betrayal, going halfway round the world in search of a truth that may destroy him. Quintin Jardine's evocation of Xavi's fated world, of the towering being that is Grandma Paloma, and of his love, the beautiful, wilful and hypnotic Grace Starshine, is an unforgettable story of a man riding a one-way train to oblivion. Will he escape, before it hits the buffers, full-speed?

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes the gripping story of the murder of a young aristocrat that puts an entire society—not just a pair of murderers—on trial. A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it? The more that is learned, the less is understood, as the story races to its inexplicable conclusion.

To read a crime novel today largely simulates the exercise of reading newspapers or watching the news. The speed and frequency with which today's bestselling works of crime fiction are produced allow them to mirror and dissect nearly contemporaneous socio-political events and conflicts. This collection examines this phenomenon and offers original, critical, essays on how national identity appears in international crime fiction in the age of populism and globalization. These essays address topics such as the array of competing nationalisms in Europe; Indian secularism versus Hindu communalism; the populist rhetoric tinged with misogyny or homophobia in the United States; racial, religious or ethnic others who are sidelined in political appeals to dominant native voices; and the increasing economic chasm between a rich and poor. More broadly, these essays inquire into themes such as how national identity and various conceptions of masculinity are woven together, how dominant native cultures interact with migrant and colonized cultures to explore insider/outsider paradigms and identity politics, and how generic and cultural boundaries are repeatedly crossed in postcolonial detective fiction.

This book explores the intersection of a number of academic areas of study that are all, individually, of growing importance: translation studies, crime fiction and world literature. The scholars included here are leaders in one or more of these areas. The frame of this volume is imagological; its focus is on the ways in which national allegories are constructed and deconstructed, encompassing descriptions of national characteristics as they play out at the level of the local or the individual as well as broader, political analyses. Its corpus, crime fiction, is shown to be a privileged site for writing the national narrative, and often in ways that are more complex and dynamic than is suggested by the genre’s much-cited role as vehicle for a new realism. Finally, these two areas are problematised through the lens of translation, which is a crucial player in both the development of crime fiction and the formation, rather than simply the interlingual transfer, of national allegory. In this volume national allegories, and the crime novels in which they emerge, are shown to be eminently versatile, foundationally plural texts that promote critical rewriting as opposed to sites for fixing meaning. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Translator.

As Spaniards set out to transform the political, social and cultural landscape of the nation following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, its crime fiction traces, challenges and celebrates these radical changes. Crime Fiction from Spain: Murder in the Multinational State provides a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between detective fiction and national and cultural identities in post-Franco democratic Spain. What sort of stories are told about the nation within the state in the crime genre? How do the conventions of the crime story shape not only the production of national and cultural identities, but also their disruption? Combining criminological theories of crime and community with an analysis of the genre’s conventions, this study challenges the simple classification of Spanish crime fiction as texts written by Spaniards, set in Spain and with Spanish characters. Instead, it develops a dramatic new reading practice which allows for a greater understanding of the role of crime fiction in the construction and articulation of different and, at times, competing, national and cultural identities, including in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia. The book provides a stimulating introduction to the key debates on the study of crime fiction and national and cultural identities in the context of a multinational state.

Crimespree Magazine Issue 67 features a special conversation between Lawrence Block with the late Bill Crider. Interviews include Michael Barson chatting with Max Allan Collins, who also talks about completing the work of Mickey Spillane, Kate Malmon talking with Steph Post, Richard Neer interviewed by Reed Farrel Coleman, and Elise Cooper has a Q&A with Karen Rose. Eryk Pruitt writes about Southern Crime Fiction, Jon Jordan on Action Comics at 80, with other articles by TR Ragan, Kristi Belcamino, and Chris Holm. There's new fiction by Andrew Riconda and J.D. Smith, and a comprehensive review of new books and DVDs round out a most exciting issue.