Catedrales

Thirty years ago, in a quiet Buenos Aires neighborhood, the dismembered and burned body of a teenage girl named Ana was found in a vacant lot. The police investigation closed without ever naming a culprit, and her middle-class, devoutly Catholic family began, quietly, to come apart.

Claudia Piñeiro tells what happened through seven narrators, each recounting the same decades-long aftermath from their own vantage point, so that guilt, grief and self-justification accumulate from every side of the family rather than from a single voice. The girl's father never stops searching, and his persistence is what eventually forces the buried truth into the open.

Catedrales is as much a novel about religion as it is a crime novel: it traces how obedience and religious extremism, taken to their extreme, produce cruelty rather than protect against it. It won the Dashiell Hammett Prize at Spain's Semana Negra de Gijón in 2021, and has since been adapted into an HBO Max series.