El protegido
The Protégé | Malpaso, 2015
Jaime looks on as the more or less dependable world in which he has always lived comes crashing down when, all of a sudden, his life takes a murky, brutal turn for the worse. Spurred on by a sense of duty, he kills two individuals (or does he?) in an attempt to escape being swept along by the course of events. Seized by panic and the sense that someone is on his trail, he finds himself drawing on a hitherto unsuspected strength. He will also discover that the woman of his dreams may also be the love of his life.
This is detective fiction at its finest, of the unputdownable sort, the sort that grabs you from page one, but also an unerring account of passion, of the opposing forces of affection and aggression, of the light and dark sides of human behavior. The Protégé is noir fiction from start to finish, assembled with clockwork precision, flawless, in which the pace doesn’t let up for an instant. Crafted with mesmerizing prose, the novel conceals a fierce, ironic dissection of a society coming apart at the seams.
«Aranda weaves a criminal plot from the smallest ripples of day-to-day life: as if aware that danger lurks within the most ordinary of lives.» Justo Navarro
«This book belongs to the best tradition of detective novels, that which manages to combine a plot where all the loose ends are satisfactorily tied up with a portrayal of a society, a period in time, and a way of being in the world.» Manuel Vilas
«Aranda builds a psychological maze that grips the reader right from the start, while gradually introducing the plot, the ‘noir’ element of the book. The author doesn’t need to modify the ordinary world as we know it for the criminal conspiracy to show, or for the tension to grow with each page.» Paloma Torres, ABC
«More than ever, short distances and irony are the hallmark of Aranda, a writer who has carved out a permanent place for himself in contemporary Spanish fiction.» María Eugenia Merelo, Sur
«The story pace and the style restlessness make it impossible to put the book down and give the novel a highly original air.» Alejandro V. García, Mercurio
