ESPECIE / SPECIES

It is summertime in Seville. Inspector Camino Vargas still heads the Homicide Brigade. Paco Arenas, her mentor and secret love is on leave and Camino is not happy to start to train a new young police officer, Evita Gallego. When on one day in the Old Town of Seville there appear three bodies, one of a skinned man, another beaten up to death and still another inflated with food to the point of breaking open, all the sings point out towards a mysterious serial killer. Only Gallego will be able to decipher a macabre message in the bodies and she will accompany Camino Vargas in a new descent into hell. Until she finds the connecting thread between them and then the case takes a most horrifying direction: the murderer imitates the methods of killing animals in the all-powerful meat industry.

If in Progenie the underlying theme was maternity and the still prevailing social impositions for women, in Especie the author puts the spotlight on the world of industrial production farms and on the way we treat animals. Do we have the right to torture them from the moment they are born just for the pleasure of eating them? Is this what the murderer wants to tell us? Inspector Camino and her team, working against time, go to slaughterhouses, farms and animal sanctuaries while the whole country is terrified by the crimes committed in the Andalusian capital. A fast-paced novel with twists and turns where nothing will be as it seems. A fascinating case, physical and psychological violence, a social and ideological dilemma and, once again, an important subject. The setting is Seville and the characters are skilfully crafted: the great Camino Vargas joins forces with a new police officer in the Brigade, Evita Gallego.