Las malas costumbres

Las malas costumbres is a noir crime novel by Spanish author Jorge Ortega, set in the small city of Cuenca during the 1960s. When a man nicknamed "el Legionario" is found dead, suspicion falls quickly on a man who argued with him the night before and then fled town — a tidy resolution for most investigators.

Civil Guard brigadier Andrés Valencia is not most investigators. He has an inconvenient habit of questioning conclusions that look too neat, a trait that carries real risk under Franco's dictatorship, where challenging the official version of events is its own kind of danger. As Valencia keeps pulling at loose threads, the case unravels into something far more complicated, exposing the silences and social decay of a provincial Spain still living under the regime's shadow.

Published by Grijalbo in November 2025, this is the first novel to feature Brigadier Valencia, told in direct, historically grounded prose with a deliberately unhurried, character-driven investigative pace.