Alicia Giménez-Bartlett

Petra Delicado, the protagonist of Bartlett’s novels, has married an architect who has no fewer than four children. Petra thus finds herself juggling her duties as a police detective, a marital venture she desperately wants to succeed, and relations with stepchildren backed by her husband’s irascible ex-wives. Into this fraught domestic arrangement intrudes a complex and mysterious case: inside a convent, a friar is murdered and the body of a blessed man, venerated as a relic, is spirited away. Unable to make sense of the crime, Petra pursues numerous leads, assisted—or more accurately, steered—by one of the convent’s nuns, who conceals a terrible secret. The novel moves along sluggishly, somewhat limp, alternating the police investigation with protracted conversations between Petra and the Mother Superior, depictions of life at the precinct, and domestic tensions that gradually give way to a cheerful, serene environment. In the end, the mystery is solved purely by chance, leaving the reader weary and disappointed rather than surprised. As in all her novels, Bartlett tackles themes far beyond the boundaries of the detective genre: in this case, the arcana of conventual life and of the Catholic Church more generally, as well as the tribulations of living together in a complex, blended family. As for her anticlericalism, the author makes her stance immediately clear, defining Catholics as > those who haven’t recovered from the traumas of a Catholic education, those who live perpetually imprisoned by guilt. In a word: poor wretches . As for cohabitation, the struggles of a couple’s relationship are summed up as follows: > Marcos and I were there, united before the law but separated by the incommensurable divide between the worlds in which we moved . Why not read it? As a detective story, it is weak and dull; as an account of social milieus and human emotions, its contents are far too superficial to hold the reader’s interest. Its sole merit is a pleasant prose style, even if it leans too heavily on dialogue—especially between Petra and her colleague Garzón; but then, why don’t the two of them just get married?

Set in Barcelona, the novels center on Inspector Petra Delicado, who tackles a series of police investigations alongside her partner, Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón. The two officers display little investigative prowess, chasing multiple leads and frequently overlooking crucial clues. In reality, personal affairs always take precedence. In *Death Rites*, an investigation is finally entrusted to Petra Delicado, who, still under the strain of two failed marriages, projects onto the inquiry such aggression that it frequently compromises her interrogations, while often operating with a distinct lack of lucidity. In *Serpents in Paradise*, it is instead a longing for a different life (defined by an orderly domestic ménage, a beautiful home, and above all, children) that leads Petra Delicado to become ensnared by the culprit, to the extent of abandoning any line of inquiry and missing an important clue. Ultimately, the detective plot is merely an occasion to portray events and situations invariably marked by profound solitude and a fundamental falseness in personal relationships. These are, after all, two facets of an existential dilemma that appear mutually contradictory: to experience sincere and honest relationships, one must live in solitude. Barcelona remains merely in the background, almost nonexistent. The author relies on dialogue and brief descriptions of the settings in which the characters move, but lacks all those sociological references and digressions so characteristic of Montalbán’s books. Certain settings, the narrative pace, and the depiction of the characters recall the American detective novel, particularly that of Raymond Chandler.