His inheritance is an enigma that he will be forced to discover.
Buenos Aires, late nineties. Luis is a city employee who enjoys his routine, both at work, which does not demand too much of him, and in his marriage. Luis suffers from a disorder he calls “flattening”, in which he lapses into a sudden catatonia and can spend hours with his mind completely black, unable to remember anything once he wakes up from this hypnosis.
Luis’ marriage to Virginia is stagnant and lacking in expectations; she complains about his lack of initiative, while he suspects that she is being unfaithful to him with a co-worker. Despite his intuition, he has never ventured to investigate further; deep down he loves her and allows himself to be dragged along by inertia.
That ordinary life takes an unexpected turn when his father, who supposedly was a traveling salesman selling Chinese trinkets in the villages, dies of a heart attack in his car while visiting Roselli, a client in Bahía Blanca.
When Luis and his wife begin to clear out his father’s apartment, he discovers something unusual: a purse with a hundred thousand dollars in it. But the money is not the only mystery that Luis finds concerning his father. At the funeral, Roselli appears and explains that he must give him something very dangerous that his father kept in the trunk of his car.
The considerable amount of money that Luis had found provokes fissures in his relationship with his wife. In addition, the sexual attraction he has long felt for his niece begins to develop. When his fed-up wife leaves him, Luis begins to investigate the connection between his father’s two enigmas: the purse and the object that is as mysterious as it is dangerous. For this reason, Luis decides to travel to Bahia Blanca to see Roselli, and finds himself confronted with all those hidden facets and secrets that he had never imagined about El Gringo, as they called his father.
Roselli speaks of Luis’ father as a great friend and someone who had even been very good to his autistic daughter, Patri. In fact, he tells him about the promise El Gringo made to him just before he died: to take care of the young girl if Roselli or his wife, who were both very ill, should die. And in case he was not there, Luis would be the one to take care of her.
Roselli gives him the very dangerous object from El Gringo’s trunk: a sniper rifle. From then on, Luis finds himself immersed in an incredibly dangerous situation from which he will not know how to escape. At the Malvón (a brothel where El Gringo used to spend a lot of time) he is kidnapped by Norma, madam of Malvón and a friend of his father. Norma urges him to kill Roselli, along with his wife and daughter. Luis, in one of his “flattenings”, carries out the deed, with no memory of what he has done when he wakes up. Having shown such coldness and determination, Norma tells him that he is the right man to continue El Gringo’s work as a hit man.
RELEVANT DATA: Horacio Convertini manages to immerse the reader not only in the unbridled and dangerous adventure that Luis faces when confronting the mystery of his own father, but also to unravel the secrets that we all hide from our loved ones and ourselves.
A reflection on who we really are, what we reveal, what we cover up and what atrocities people keep hidden.
Horacio Convertini is a journalist, writer and one of the most powerful voices of the new Argentine noir literature. He was editor-in-chief of the Police section of the newspaper El Clarín. He is a finalist of the Gabriel Sijé Contest and won the Second Award of the National Fund for the Arts Contest, the Cosecha Eñe Award, the Extremo Negro-BAN! Contest, the Azabache International Noir and Crime Novel Award, the Silverio Cañada Memorial Award and the Sigmar Award for Children’s and Young People’s Literature.
What the critics have said:
“Convertini has a passion for storytelling. His prose is a machine gun that fires thick ammunition. Situations, characters and plot are intertwined in an unstoppable gear, from which readers cannot escape.” Revista de Cultura
“ The novel is hypnotic (…) No one comes out of The Darkness Inside of Me (Lo oscuro que hay en mí) the same way they went in, not even the readers.” Clarín
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.
