Alicia Giménez Bartlett

Who is Petra Delicado? This enigmatic question presents the best-selling police inspector with her toughest challenge. Pure noir, 100% crime-free.

What we know about Petra Delicado is that she is a veteran homicide detective and that her contradictions are illustrated by her first and last names (which mean “stone” and “delicate”, respectively). She has always abhorred marriage and yet she has been married three times. She decided not to have children, but her last husband is the father of three. She cannot stand conventions or old-fashioned people, but the most important man in her life, Fermín Garzón, is their personification.

In Petra's new novel there are no murderers, no corpses, no crime mystery, but there is an unsolved riddle: who is Petra Delicado? In what amounts to a sort of memoir, Petra recalls her life, from being an intelligent and rebellious young girl, with a dominant mother, to becoming a woman in search of a place in a world tailored to the interests of men. Her indiscipline in the religious school, the liberating university years, the infatuations, the premature married life that immediately settled into a corrosive routine, her occasional lovers, her dissatisfaction with the practice of law, all lead Petra to take a stand and make the heroic resolution to assume control, in the light of a unique, non-transferable morality, of the reins of her life.

"A clear example of how crime fiction and literary fiction can be the same thing. With this assault on the most private part of her work, Giménez Bartlett reminds us to what extent some of the most beloved and universal characters in literature are derived from the genre, both from the classics and from contemporary works: Lisbeth Salander, Carvalho, Montalbano and, of course, Petra Delicado. How else could it be?” M. Sanmartín, ABC