Teresa Solana

The third novel of Norma Forester Crime Series set during the political conflict in Catalonia in October 2017.

Barcelona, 20 September 2017. There are only eleven days to go to the Catalan independence referendum, that the Spanish courts have declared to be illegal. A good number of Catalans, led by the government of the Generalitat, is preparing to defy the ban, while the Civil Guard searches to no avail for the urns where citizens will place their ballot papers.  

The Mossos d’Esquadra, the local police force to which Inspector Norma Forester belongs, experience moments of enormous tension. At this crucial moment in history, Inspector Forester and her team must visit the radical district of Gràcia and investigate the mysterious murder of a man with no identity in a scenario devoid of clues.  

Inspector Norma Forester is the granddaughter of an English member of the International Brigades, and her family is a varied bunch: a forensic doctor husband, a hippy mother, a squatter daughter and an aunt, a nun in an enclosed order, who operates as a hacker from her austere convent cell. Both Norma’s family and the team of detectives she leads reflect the different attitudes and aspirations within Catalan society as regards independence and the referendum for self-determination.  

The novel begins on 20 September 2017, when citizens are protesting in front of the Economics Ministry against the arrests and searches being carried out by the Civil Guard, and ends on the night of 1 October, after the results of the referendum have been declared.  During eleven roller-coaster days, Norma and her team have to investigate a disturbing crime while, all around them, a large section of Catalan society prepares to carry out the greatest act of peaceful civil disobedience Europe has ever seen.   

October is a gripping police procedural imbued with the unique style of author Teresa Solana who gives readers an original take on these political tensions in Barcelona.