A fifteenth-century painting by a Flemish master is about to be auctioned when Julia, a young art restorer, discovers a peculiar inscription hidden in a corner: Who killed the knight? In the painting, the Duke of Flanders and his knight are locked in a game of chess, and a dark lady lurks mysteriously in the background. Julia is determined to solve the five-hundred-year-old murder, but as she begins to look for clues, several of her friends in the art world are brutally murdered in quick succession. Messages left with the bodies suggest a crucial connection between the chess game in the painting, the knight's murder, the sordid underside of the contemporary art world, and the latest deaths. Just when all of the players in the mystery seem to be pawns themselves, events race toward a shocking conclusion. A thriller like no other, The Flanders Panel presents a tantalizing puzzle for any connoisseur of mystery, chess, art, and history. Description in Spanish: A finales del siglo XV un viejo maestro flamenco introduce en uno de sus cuadros, en forma de partida de ajedrez, la clave de un secreto que puede cambiar la historia de Europa. Cinco siglos despues una joven restauradora de arte, un anticuario homosexual y un excentrico jugador de ajedrez unen sus fuerzas para tratar de resolver el enigma....

Andrés Faulques, a world-renowned war photographer, has retreated to a tower overlooking the Spanish coast, where he paints a vast mural incorporating the indelible images of conflict he’s witnessed in his lifetime.

One night, an unexpected visitor interrupts his solitude. As Faulques struggles to recall the face, the man explains that he was the subject of an iconic photo taken by Faulques in a war zone years ago–a photo that destroyed his life. “And why have you come looking for me?” asks Faulques. The stranger answers, “Because I’m going to kill you.”

So begins a life-or-death exchange in which Faulques is forced to recall a time when he loved a beautiful woman and risked his life daily for art and testimony. Yet as the tense dialogue between Faulques and his would-be killer continues, the stakes grow even higher. What they are grappling with becomes not just Faulques’ fate, but the very nature of love and cruelty itself....

From acclaimed and bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte comes the fourth adventure of Captain Alatriste, “the brooding, charismatic hero of his wildly successful Spanish swashbuckling novels” (The New York Times).

Arturo Pérez-Reverte has enthralled readers and critics around the globe with his Captain Alatriste series. Having sold four and a half million copies to date in the Spanish-speaking world, the series has made Pérez-Reverte a literary superstar and his fictional seventeenth-century mercenary a national icon.

The King’s Gold picks up in Seville, 1626. After serving with honor at the bloody siege of Breda, Captain Alatriste and his protégé, Inigo Balboa, have returned: battle-weary, short of cash, and with few prospects for honest work. But the Spanish empire is as dangerous as ever, and it’s not long before Alatriste receives an intriguing offer of short-term employment. He and Inigo must recruit a dozen swordsmen and mercenaries for a risky job involving a dazzling amount of contraband gold and a heavily guarded Spanish galleon returning from the West Indies. The offer comes from the king himself, for at stake is nothing less than the Spanish Crown, and its dominion over the wealth of the Americas.

The seedy taverns, the teeming prisons of Seville, the sand dunes of Guadalquivir find Alatriste, Inigo, and their motley band of cutthroats embarking on a new adventure, one that brings them surprising new alliances and perilous encounters with old enemies....

A hacker breaks into the Vatican's system. A baroque church in Seville kills to protect itself. A beautiful Andalusian aristocrat, a handsome priest/agent who handles the Church's dirty work, a jealous banker and his gambling secretary, a seventy-year-old woman who only drinks coke, a postcard from a woman dead a hundred years ago, and the mysterious legacy of Xaloc-the last Spanish privateer, who vanished from the Cuban coast in 1898-are the building blocks for this ingenious, complex and fascinating novel. Description in Spanish: Un pirata informatico que se infiltra en el Vaticano. Una iglesia barroca, en Sevilla, que mata para defenderse. Tres pintorescos malvados que aspiran a mantener viva la copla espanola. Una bella aristocrata andaluza. Un apuesto sacerdote-agente especialista en asuntos sucios. Un banquero celoso y su secretario ludopata. Una septuagenaria que bebe coca-cola. La tarjeta postal de una mujer muerta un siglo atras. Y el misterioso legado del capitan Xaloc, ultimo corsario espanol, desaparecido frente a las costas de Cuba en 1898. Con esos ingredientes, Arturo Perez-Reverte construye en La piel del tambor una ingeniosa, compleja y fascinante trama novelesca. Con su imaginacion desbordante, su espectacular dominio de la ingenieria narrativa y de los diversos generos superpuestos -misterio, policiaco, historia, romanticismo, aventura, folletin- el autor nos sumerge sin aliento en una historia que corta al lector cualquier posible retirada, arrastrandolo a un enigma cuya clave se esconde a la sombra de los viejos muelles del Guadalquivir; donde todavia hoy, en las noches de luna llena, sombras de mujer agitan sus panuelos y goletas tripuladas por fantasmas siguen zarpando rumbo a las Antillas....

From the international bestselling author, the fourth adventure of Captain Alatriste

With The King's Gold, bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte continues to enthrall readers and critics with his heroic seventeenth-century mercenary, Captain Alatriste. The fourth adventure picks up in Seville in 1626. After serving with honor at the bloody siege of Breda, Alatriste and his protégé, Iñigo Balboa, accept a risky job involving a dozen swordsmen and mercenaries at their command, a dazzling amount of contraband gold, and a heavily guarded Spanish galleon returning from the West Indies. The job offer comes from the king himself, for at stake is nothing less than the Spanish Crown, and its dominion over the wealth of the Americas. But for Alatriste, a very personal surprise awaits him on that galleon.

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A war photographer, witness to most of the late 20th Century wars, was never able to capture the photo that would explain the chaos of the universe. Now, he starts painting a fresco on a Mediterranean tower, disturbed by the memories of a woman he can't forget and a man who wants to kill him. Description in Spanish: En una torre junto al Mediterraneo, en busca de la foto que nunca pudo hacer, un antiguo fotografo pinta un gran fresco circular en la pared: el paisaje intemporal de una batalla. Lo acompanan en la tarea un rostro que regresa del pasado para cobrar una deuda mortal, y la sombra de una mujer desaparecida diez anos atras. El pintor de batallas arrastra al lector, subyugado, a traves de la compleja geometria del caos del siglo XXI: el arte, la ciencia, la guerra, el amor, la lucidez y la soledad, se combinan en el vasto mural de un mundo que agoniza....

This is not a fictional tale nor a history book, nor does it have-strictly speaking-a main character, as there were countless men and women involved in the events that took place in Madrid in 1808. Heroes and cowards, victims and executioners, history kept the names of most of them. The people, places, and events recounted here are real, as are much of the words that are spoken. In this book, Arturo Perez-Reverte transforms the obscure and individual stories recorded in books and archives into a collective account. The author's imagination is therefore reduced to the mortar that joins the narratives. By making use of the most basic liberties that a novel allows, these pages bring to life the individuals who, for over two hundred years, have either remained anonymous or lived only in brief accounts of official papers. Description in Spanish: Este relato no es ficcion ni libro de Historia. Tampoco tiene un protagonista concreto, pues fueron innumerables los hombres y mujeres envueltos en los sucesos del 2 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid. Heroes y cobardes, victimas y verdugos, la Historia retuvo los nombres de buena parte de ellos: las relaciones de muertos y heridos, los informes militares, las memorias escritas por actores principales o secundarios de la tragedia, aportan datos rigurosos para el historiador y ponen limites a la imaginacion del novelista. Cuantas personas y lugares aparecen aqui son autenticos, asi como los sucesos narrados y muchas de las palabras que se pronuncian. En Un dia de colera, Arturo Perez-Reverte convierte en historia colectiva las pequenas y oscuras historias particulares registradas en archivos y libros. Lo imaginado, por tanto, se reduce a la argamasa narrativa que une las piezas. Con las licencias minimas que la palabra novela justifica, estas paginas pretenden devolver la vida a quienes durante doscientos anos solo han sido personajes anonimos en grabados y lienzos contemporaneos, o escueta relacion de nombres en los documentos oficiales....

Acclaimed author Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s internationally bestselling series, the saga of the swordsman-for-hire Captain Alatriste, continues in The Sun Over Breda. Fifteen-year-old Iñigo Balboa enlists to serve as his master’s aide, and narrates their further adventures of swordplay and skirmishes, mutiny and wartime honor, as Captain Alatriste rejoins his Cartagena regiment to take part in the battles and siege of Breda. In Spain, Alatriste’s nemesis, Luis de Alquézar, grows more powerful, as Iñigo’s mysterious friend Angélica hints at some plans upon his return. Once again the exploits of the seventeenth-century mercenary will thrill and delight the legions of readers eager to cheer a hero for the ages....

From the acclaimed and bestselling author comes the fifth adventure of Captain Alatriste, "the brooding, charismatic hero of his wildly successful Spanish swashbuckling novels" (The New York Times).

In the cosmopolitan world of seventeenth-century Madrid, with its posh theaters and gleaming palaces, Captain Alatriste and his protégé, Íñigo, are fish out of water. But the king and court are keeping Alatriste on retainer-he has proved useful in the past. As a veteran with no other source of income, Alatriste chooses to remain, even as his "employment" brings him uncomfortably close to old enemies. Íñigo, now a young man and veteran of the Hundred Years War, chooses to remain with his master and press his ill-fated romance with the beautiful but sinister Angélica de Alquézar. Alatriste, for his part, begins an affair with the famous-and famously beautiful- actress María de Castro, and discovers that the competition for her favors may be much more dangerous than he'd bargained for, especially when Alatriste and Íñigo become unwilling participants in a court conspiracy that could lead them both to the gallows....