The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from the IRA to the Basque separatists of ETA, but now either retired from the armed struggle or quietly brewing fresh mayhem.
A mothballed secret agent, one of those ‘nasty angels’ who ‘never forget what everyone else forgets’, arrives in ‘Ruán’ in 1997 on an off-the-books mission hatched in London and Madrid. Our narrator, Tomás Nevinson (an Anglo-Spanish spook with an uncanny ‘talent for mimicry’, encountered in Javier Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla), must identify and eliminate the culprit on the orders of his sinister spymaster, Bertram Tupra.
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