From the winner of the Feminino Lumen Prize for best female writer in Spain, a new book in the Petra Delicado mystery series.


Inspector Petra Delicado has been chained to a tiresome desk job in the documentation department of the Barcelona police force for months. But things are about to change. The department is short-handed and there’s a serial rapist on the loose. Delicado is partnered with the polite and impossibly compliant Sgt. Fermín Garzón with orders to solve the case before it succeeds in completely ruining the good name of the Barcelona police force. Tough, sexy, at times apparently pitiless, Petra Delicado is a new kind of cop in Spanish crime writing. As she does battle with sexist colleagues, ruthless reporters, indifferent witnesses, hardened criminals, ex-husbands, and houseplants that just won’t flower, she sometimes thinks her thirst for new challenges and perpetual change is more trouble than its worth.