Asesinato en la plaza de la farola

A vagrant turns up dead at a bank's cash machine in the Plaza de la Independencia — known locally as the Plaza de la Farola — in Castellón de la Plana. Inspector Bartolomé Monfort, a man with Castellón roots and a past as sad as it is murky, travels from Barcelona at the police chief's request to take the case, alongside colleague Silvia Redó.

The investigation soon turns up a detail that does not fit a homeless victim: suspiciously clean, manicured fingernails. Following that thread through the seaside town of Benicàssim and into the life of Rosa, a troubled elderly woman tied to the dead man, Monfort uncovers the greed, drugs, envy and revenge that a comfortable, apparently respectable provincial city keeps just out of sight.

This is the first case in Julio César Cano's Bartolomé Monfort series — a classically styled, noir-inflected police procedural built on a wide field of suspects and a detective whose own solitude runs as deep as the city's secrets.