Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Mister Joaquim Pelletier and his wife request the services of the private detective Pepe Carvalho to find the murderer of their only son, Mariano. As the investigations progress, Pepe finds out that Mariano was not such a model son as his father thought. He had a double life: a banker at daytime, a thug at night; he was cooperating with Jesús Arquimedes, the boss of the underworld, by doing illegal works for him. But Mariano had decided to betray Arquímedes, embezzling $500 000 of the money he was laundering in Bank Pelletier, to start a new life in the USA. Arquímedes puts pressure on Carvalho to find his money. Surprisingly enough for the detective, the guilty one is not Arquímedes, but the father of Mariano. Mister Jaoquim had a passionate relationship with his son since childhood, he wanted to mold his son as he had always dreamed, and never admitted that Mariano was someone different and a rebel who wanted to run away from Barcelona for ever.

Two Frenchmen, Bernadette and Lebrum, arrive in Barcelona and hire detective Bardon to find Alekos, the former Greek lover of the woman.

Pepe Carvalho receives a call from an ex-lover in distress.

On March 12, 1956, Basque Nationalist Jesús de Galíndez Suarez disappears from his apartment in New York, never heard from again. He had been working with the FBI and was about to publish a book critical of Dominican strongman, Trujillo. In 1988, a graduate student, Muriel Colber, wants to make Galíndez the subject of her dissertation. She's in Spain doing research; finding little, she goes to Santo Domingo. At every turn, the CIA, in the person of agent Robards, tries to thwart her; and, at each turn, as she considers abandoning the project, someone offers new information, often contradictory. She wants the truth behind the Galíndez mystery; will she find it?

Carvalho is investigating the murder of a prison officer. The police suspect a young delinquent who had threatened to kill the officer. But Carvalho and Biscuter are on the trail of a friend and ex-cell partner of the defendant called "el Navajas" ("the penknife"). He is a pusher in the discotheque Up & Down. Things get worse when "el Navajas" turns out to be the main suspect of the murder in cold blood of a boy from a good family in the discotheque. Carvalho must find the pusher before the police in order to avoid that his client is sentenced to life imprisonment.

To revive its sagging fortunes, Barcelona FC has bought the services of Jack Mortimer, European Footballer of the Year. No sooner has Mortimer taken possession of his company Porsche than death threats start arriving. Are they a hoax, the work of a loner or are they connected to the awesome real estate speculation that is tearing Barcelona apart? While Catalan pimps and racketeers are being hustled off the streets by crime syndicates from the Middle East, Pepe Carvalho is thinking of retirement, but the need to save the soul of his beloved Barcelona forces him to take on a case that can only end in disaster.

Carvalho is hired to investigate the alleged threats to the daughter of the civil governor of Barcelona. Step by step, Carvalho realizes that there is something hidden in core of the mystery that goes back to something that happened in the past and that is related to the governor himself.

A man's body turns up on a Barcelona beach with a message tattooed on his arm: "I was born to revolutionize hell". Detective Pepe Carvalho is put in charge of the case, taking him from the back streets of Barcelona to the Amsterdam canals, with no effect whatsoever on his peculiar investigation methods.