Five and a Half Women

Palmira Candelli, a girl for the Raval quarter, was raped and murdered by three people. Inspector Méndez, an old-school cop who feels marginalised by his colleagues, starts an unofficial investigation into the crime, moved by how helpless the dead girl’s mother and sister are. Soon one of the rapists turns up dead, and things start happening very quickly and without let-up, linking a series of characters –usual suspects, lonely women, people presumed innocent– in a brilliant plot dreamed up by one of the masters of Spanish crime fiction, Franisco González Ledesma.