The Angst-Ridden Executive


Book Description

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.




Off Side


Book Description

Barcelona’s new soccer star is receiving death threats and Pepe Carvalho, gourmet gumshoe and former political prisoner under Franco, is hired to find out who’s behind it. Pepe Carvalho is set to retire. Content to live out the rest of his days enjoying the best food and wine Catalonia has to offer, his plans are put on hold when an executive from Barcelona's world-famous soccer team pays him a visit. “The center forward will be killed at dusk,” reads the note the executive gives to Carvalho. With that, the detective, former communist, and one-time employee of the CIA, must find out where this note is from. Is the threat real? Is it the work of one person? Or is it one of the real estate moguls tearing Barcelona apart in their battle over the most important properties of Catalonia? Here Montalbán does for the game of soccer what he has done for food. In an exquisite portrait of Spain’s most beloved sport, soccer and politics mix in a gripping mystery about the reckless excesses—and limits—of power.




Southern Seas


Book Description

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.




Tattoo


Book Description

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."




An Olympic Death


Book Description

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.




Sweetblood


Book Description

Sixteen-year-old Lucy Szabo is Undead -- at least according to her own theories about vampirism. Lucy believes that the first vampires -- with their pale skin, long teeth, and uncontrollable thirst -- were dying diabetics. And she should know. She's a diabetic herself. When Lucy becomes involved with Draco -- a self-proclaimed "real" vampire she meets in the Transylvania Internet chat room -- her world begins crashing down around her. Caught up in late-night parties and Goth culture, she begins to lose control of her grades, relationships, and health. Lucy realizes she needs to make some important choices, and fast. But it may already be too late.




Four Friends


Book Description

When BJ, a newcomer to Mill Valley, enters their close-knit circle and opens up about her dark past, Gerri, Andy, and Sonja come together to help her get back on track and, in the process, make strides in their own lives, becoming stronger as individuals and unfaltering as friends.




Tea in the Harem


Book Description

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




The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro


Book Description

A literary thriller of heroin rings and headless bodies uncovers social ills and corruption in modern day Portugal, whileas in all of Tabucchi's workblurring genre boundaries. Antonio Tabucchi, Italy's premier writer and a best-selling author throughout Europe, draws together Manolo the gypsy, Firmino, a young tabloid journalist with a weakness for Lukacs and Vittorini, and Don Fernando, an overweight lawyer with a professed resemblance to the actor Charles Laughton, to solve a murder that leads far up and down Portugal's social ladder. As the investigation leads deeper into Portugal's power structure, the novel defies expectations, departing from the formulaic twists of a suspense story to consider the moral weight of power and its abuse.




A Visit from the Goon Squad


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review