Introducing one of crime fiction’s most legendary detectives, and greatest writers, to America When Antonio Jauma, a director of the multinational conglomerate Petnay, is murdered, his widow seeks out private investigator Pepe Carvalho, who had met and forgotten the playboy executive after their single chance encounter—back when Carvalho still worked for the CIA. Jauma was a “womanizer,” according to a friend, “of the least pleasant sense,” and the police have decided that the murder is the work of an unhappy pimp. But Carvalho doggedly pursues his own phlegmatic investigation, with time out for his signature book burning (Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reasoning; Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don), cooking (leek soup and a freshly-caught steamed turbot), and running with his girlfriend Charo, whose last name he can’t remember.

Assignment: Finding one of Argentina's 30,000 "Disappeared" ... likely outcome: Becoming one yourself. The Argentine army's "Dirty War" disappeared 30,000 people, and the last thing Pepe Carvalho wants is to investigate one of the vanished, even if that missing person is his cousin. But blood proves thicker than a fine Mendoza Cabernet Sauvignon, even for a jaded gourmand like Pepe, and so at his family's request he leaves Barcelona for Buenos Aires. What follows is perhaps Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's masterpiece: a combination white-knuckle investigation and moving psychological travelogue. Pepe quickly learns that "Buenos Aires is a beautiful city hell-bent on self-destruction," and finds himself on a trail involving boxers and scholars, military torturers and seductive semioticians, Borges fans and cold-blooded murderers. And despite the wonders of the Tango and the country's divine cuisine, he also knows one thing: He'll have to confront the traumas of Argentina's past head on if he wants not only to find his cousin, but simply stay alive.

Barcelona detective Pepe Carvalho’s radical past catches up with him when a powerful businessman—a patron of artists and activists—is found dead after going missing for a year. In search of the spirit of Paul Gauguin, Stuart Pedrell—eccentric Barcelona businessman, construction magnate, dreamer, and patron of poets and painters—disappeared not long after announcing plans to travel to the South Pacific. A year later he is found stabbed to death at a construction site in Barcelona. Gourmand gumshoe Pepe Carvalho is hired by Pedrell’s wife to find out what happened. Carvalho, a jaded former communist, must travel through circles of the old anti-Franco left wing on the trail of the killer. But with little appetite for politics, Carvalho also leads us on a tour through literature, cuisine, and the criminal underbelly of Barcelona in a typically brilliant twist on the genre by a Spanish master.

Only Pepe Carvalho could use a tattoo saying "Born to Raise Hell in Hell" as evidence that the police are, once again, dead wrong In a Spain still stifled under the rule of Franco, former CIA operative--and former Communist--Pepe Carvalho has become so cynical he seems to care about nothing except food and sex. He's even taken to burning the occasional book in his Barcelona apartment, just so he can have a fire going in the fireplace when he eats some bacalhao. But when he sees the cops bungling a case he's hired to investigate--that of a body pulled out of the sea--he's roused by a sense of injustice. The cops think the murder was connected to local drug dealers and brothels, and they begin raiding bars and harassing Barcelona's women of the night. But Carvalho's gut tells him something else is going on, and the cops are wrong once again. As the cops stir up more and more trouble, and Carvalho gets more and more entwined, he's only got one clue: a tattoo on the dead man's body, one which reads: "Born to Raise Hell in Hell."

As Barcelona prepares for the Games, the city is turned over to make way for new roads, a new stadium and the giant prawns of Mariscal. Private Investigator Pepe Carvalho - who remembers the good old days when a hammer always came with a sickle - now finds himself forced to work for Olympic entrepreneurs whose only game plan is to make a fast buck. As Montalbán's overweight hero cruises the backstreets of the Barcelona dream, finding dead bodies and broken socialist promises, he remembers an older, seedier Barcelona hidden behind the shiny new Olympic City. Like his beloved city, Carvalho is forced to confront the sins of the past.

The lives of second-generation Algerians in a Paris housing project, the basis of the award-winning film.¶"Writing that is both dazzling and economical and a moral and aesthetic elegance that does not judge. The greatest attribute of this extraordinary first novel is its thirst for life."--Le Quotidien de Paris