Introducing one of crime fiction’s most legendary detectives, and greatest writers, to AmericaThe Argentine army’s “Dirty War” disappeared 30,000 people in six years and the last thing Pepe Carvalho wants is to investigate another vanished person, even if that missing person is his cousin. But blood proves thicker than a fine Mendoza Cabernet Savignon even for a nihilistic gourmand like Pepe.Once there, he quickly learns that “Buenos Aires is a beautiful city hell-bent on self destruction” and he’ll have to confront the traumas of Argentina’s past head on if he wants to stay alive, and find his cousin.The Quintet is a moving psychological travelogue inhabited by boxers, scholars, seductive semioticians and Borges and infused with the tango, music, literature and, as always, divine cuisine.Review“The most metaphysical gumshoe on the streets. . . the plot is as concerned with exploring capitalism’s malignancy as it is with corpses and femmes fatales.”—*The Times*“Montalbán does for Barcelona what Chandler did for Los Angeles—he exposes the criminal power relationships beneath the facade of democracy.”—*The Guardian*About the AuthorBorn in Barcelona in 1939, poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was one of Spain’s greatest writers. A well-known gourmand, he also wrote often about food. He is best known for his crime series featuring Pepe Carvalho, which won him international acclaim and numerous awards, including the Planeta Prize and the International Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. He died in 2003 in Hong Kong, on his way home to Barcelona.Nick Caistor's translations from Spanish and Portuguese include works by José Saramago, Paulo Coelho, and Eduardo Mendoza.

Language NotesText: English, Spanish (translation) About the AuthorManuel Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona in 1939. He was a journalist, novelist and creator of Pepe Carvalho, a fast-living, gourmet private detective. Montalbán won both the Raymond Chandler Prize and the French Grand Prix of Detective Fiction for his thrillers, which are translated into all major languages. He died in October 2003.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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 wrongIn 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."From the Trade Paperback edition.

Introducing one of crime fiction’s most legendary detectives, and greatest writers, to AmericaWhen 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.