Natura quasi morta

Natura quasi morta / Almost Still Life

Novel , 2011

Alfaguara

21st of November 2008: The disappearance of a Romanian student in the Autonomous University of Barcelona. It is during the Anti-Bologna strike when the first alarm that something strange is happening on campus. Overnight, Constantinu Iliescu has escaped, literally. Police officers, teachers and students will coordinate efforts to find a reliable track. But soon a new disappearance triggers a terrible nightmare. Just like in a macabre game, the victims and the suspects multiply, by testing the tracing of those involved. Nothing is what it seems.

Natura quasi morta is an astute and brilliant novel of intrigue, which grips us from the first page. With immediate and contemporary characters, sophisticated crimes and everyday settings which the author knows at first hand, Carme Rieara successfully maintains the suspense with just the right dose of irony and reality.

Natura quasi morta (Almost Still Life) is in fact a mix of detective and campus fiction set in a very contemporary European university context familiar to the author, with a significant amount of social criticism thrown in, especially of university staff and students. Loosely based on the true case of a French Erasmus student who disappeared from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where Riera herself is professor of Spanish Literature, the style of the book owes a debt to other detective-story writers from Spain such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Andreu Martín, and international writers such as Donna Leon and the Scandinavians [...] “ Judith Willies