Blood Crime

A multi-genre gothic novel of the horrific early days of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, perfect for fans of Roberto Bolaño and Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Startling . . . Blood Crime (beautifully translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent) has a sort of concentrated power that’s rare in horror novels. It’s akin to poetry." —The New York Times Book Review

It is 1936, and Barcelona burns as the Spanish Civil War takes over. The city is a bloodbath. Yet in all this death, the murders of a Marist monk and a young boy, drained of their blood, are strange enough to catch a police inspector’s attention. His quest for justice is complicated by the politics, dangers, and espionage of daily life in a war zone. The Marist brothers of the murdered monk are being persecuted; meanwhile, a convent of Capuchin nuns hides in plain sight, trading favors with the military police to stay alive. In their midst is a thirteen-year-old novice who stumbles into the clutches of the murderer. Can she escape in this city of no happy endings?

Narrated by a vampire who thrives in the havoc of the war, this stunning novel, inspired by the true story of a massacre in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, is a gothic reflection on the nature of monsters, in all their human forms.

Sebastià Alzamora i Martín was born in Mallorca in 1972 and graduated from the Universitat de les Illes Balears with a degree in Catalan philology. He first rose to prominence as a poet with a collection called Rafel, which he published in 1994. Since that time, he has written three other volumes of poetry and five novels. He has been awarded numerous prizes for both his fiction and his poetry, including the prestigious Sant Jordi Prize for Blood Crime. He is the editorial director of the Catalan magazine Cultura as well as a regular columnist for various newspapers, including Avui and Ara. He lives in Majorca.
 
Martha Tennent & Maruxa Relaño are a mother-daughter team of English-language translators, working primarily from Catalan and Spanish. Martha Tennent has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for her translation of The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda. Maruxa Relaño was a translation editor for The Wall Street Journal and has written about immigration, local politics, and the Latino community for several US publications, including the New York Daily News, New York Magazine, and  Newsday. They currently live in Barcelona.