When blackmail backfires.
Bruno, Raquel and Cristian are an atypical trio. They are three hustlers, consumers of drugs and alcohol, and bar crawlers. Now, they seem to have found the business that will get them out of their misery: attending brothels to blackmail wealthy men who go there to be unfaithful to their partners. Bruno will control the business, his girlfriend, Raquel, will do the accounting and Cristian, the field work.
But everything changes when they find and decide to follow Max, a divorced father of three, and his mistress Merche who is clouding his judgment. Although Max seems to be an approachable guy at first, he doesn’t have much to lose, although he does have much to gain, since his wife left him when she discovered that he had been unfaithful and wants Merche to break up with her husband, Gero. So, instead of giving in to blackmail, he decides to double the bet. A game of ferocity and extortion begins between Max and Cristian. The former wants to see Gero dead and the latter is determined to go out with a bang and get enough money to leave both Barcelona and his partners behind. This could be his chance. Together they plan to end Gero’s life. Cristian will be in charge of shooting him, but everything becomes tricky when he gives Max away. As a result, Max is forced to kill them both in order to finally get Merche back.
RELEVANT DATA: Don’t Call Home (No llames a casa) has been awarded the Valencia Negra Award for Best Novel. Its first edition sold out in less than a month.
Carlos Zanón has won the Hammett Award, the Novepol Award and the Brigada Award for best crime novel of the year, among others. He has also been a finalist for the Silverio Cañada Memorial Award, Giallo e dell Noir, the Violeta Negra Award and the City of Santa Cruz Award. His article on Diego Maradona published in La Vanguardia has been selected for the Panenka Awards.
Some of his novels have been selected as the best of the year in different media outlets. He has also worked as a scriptwriter in Érase una vez Juan Marsé (Alea Producciones).
What the critics have said:
“Carlos Zanón is the Spanish Jim Thompson […] Don’t Call Home (No llames a casa) becomes an examination of personal relationships, of everyone and anyone, that stimulates emotion, reflection and exudes wisdom of those who know how to attribute the damage to those responsible, without denying their noble side or ever falling into the cheap excuse of guilt that simplifies everything.” Lorenzo Silva.
“Don’t Call Home (No llames a casa) is terrific, a very well plotted and narrated story, a clean-cut suspenseful thriller at heart. But it is not a genre novel. It is not formulaic. It is an open wound, a dead-end street of bitterness, a bottomless pit that nowadays no one would have the guts to investigate without the protective shield, the professional mask, of the crime novel. So that the reader does not get scared. So that perhaps not even the writer will be frightened (of his own self).” Anna Grau
“You can be a Barcelona writer in many ways. […] With Carlos Zanón’s denim jacket, with which he writes his gritty novels, of spectral alleyways, of an extracommunal Barcelona and of boiled mussels in the presentations of the Noir and Cime bookstore.” Javier Pérez Andújar
“Don’t Call Home (No llames a casa) is an outstanding example of the genre, which departs from predictable clichés without disfiguring the inescapable characters of the story.” El Cultural
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish, French, English.
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