El lejano país de los estanques

"El lejano país de los estanques" (1998) is the novel that introduced Lorenzo Silva's Civil Guard duo, Sergeant Rubén Bevilacqua and Agent Virginia Chamorro, now one of Spanish crime fiction's best-known investigative pairings. In the stifling heat of a Spanish August, Bevilacqua is ordered to look into the death of a foreign woman whose body is found in a residential development on Mallorca. His partner on the case is Chamorro, a rookie officer, and together they go undercover into a world of nightclubs, nudist beaches, petty dealing and shifting loyalties to unravel what happened to the elusive victim, Eva.

Silva builds the investigation on a mix of procedural detail, everyday human relationships and carefully measured humor, moving, as one critic put it, "with skill from tense moments to a humorous tone." The result is a fast-moving, character-driven mystery that critics and readers alike describe as a novel that reads in one sitting, and it set the template for the long-running Bevilacqua and Chamorro series that followed.

The novel won Spain's Premio Ojo Crítico de Narrativa in 1998 and remains the entry point most readers use to meet Bevilacqua and Chamorro before following them through more than a dozen further cases.