Corona de flores
» Memorial Silverio Cañada (Gijón Noir) Award
A crime novel with a gothic heart, set in the shadowed streets of 19th-century Barcelona.
Barcelona, 1877. The city shudders beneath a cloud of chemical smoke and lives in fear of a killer known only as The Hope Murderer. The case falls to two unlikely investigators: Inspector Semproni de Paula, a small, paranoid, and violent man, and Menelaus Roca, an agoraphobic, light-sensitive anatomist with a past touched by homicidal madness.
Surrounding them is a cast of darkly entangled characters: Aniol Almarrosa, the city’s literary darling, author of the decadent serial novel every young reader tries to imitate, waging his own war against morality; Max Téller, underworld kingpin, flamboyantly superstitious, always in drag and accompanied by a sinister little monkey; Dado Blokium, pompous scholar and diplomat; and Liberata, Roca’s mute maid, locked in a twisted relationship with her master and keeper of a secret that could unravel everything.
From the city’s seedy underbelly to palace drawing rooms, from its diseased subterranean corridors to the high towers of observatories watching a sky in flux, Javier Calvo’s new novel is an esoteric, fever-drenched descent into horror—a gothic crime story brimming with delirium and dread.
TRANSLATIONS
France: Galaade; Italy: Dalai
