El último barco

One autumn morning, as Galicia's coast is still recovering from a storm, Inspector Leo Caldas is visited by a worried father: his daughter Mónica Andrade did not show up for the family's Sunday meal, nor did she appear to teach her ceramics class at Vigo's School of Arts and Crafts. Nothing in her home or her routine suggests anything was wrong — but Caldas soon finds that, as in the sea itself, the calmest surface can hide dark and dangerous currents underneath.

Aided by his brusque partner Rafael Estévez and his own father, Caldas works the case against mounting pressure from all sides, and crosses paths with Camilo, a young autistic man whose photographic memory lets him reproduce, in precise detail, scenes he has witnessed for only a moment.

"El último barco" is the third entry in Domingo Villar's Leo Caldas series, following "Ojos de agua" and "La playa de los ahogados," and arrived after a near ten-year wait between books. Reviewers describe it less as a fast-moving thriller than as a character study — of Vigo, of solitary people, and of a detective as melancholic as the ría he polices.