Here we have another example that books that earn book awards are normally winners because the author is a friend of someone in the jury. As they say in Spanish, you scratch my back and I will scratch yours.
Because this poor attempt at noir style is... just that, poor. The style is high school level, the characters seem to have come out of a 101 make-a-prototypical-Chinese manual and the story is... well, a mess. It all goes around some stolen money to the Chinese Triads in Barcelona. It is a MacGuffin as good as any other. But, oh, god, the decisions the characters in the book take. They all seem to have a problem with maturity, and a very basic obsession with random, no, not even that, with pointless sex. Sex in a novel is an extra if it has a reason to be, or the characters are fleshed out enough, or...
Well, poor Andreu Martin seems to have forgotten how to write with this novel. I remember his novels about young detective-I don't follow the rules- Flanagan. They were fun to read, simple and for a 13-year-old, complex enough. Here he writes a novel for adults with an style and sense that would make, well, sense if he was trying to replicate the style of his favorite author and he was 8 years old.
As I said, this is supposed to be about Chinese and Chinese Triads in Barcelona. The Chinese that appear in the novel are all pathetic copies out of a Jackie Chan movie (don't worry, the author manages to bring his name into the novel, probably in a poor attempt at tongue-in-cheek). He doesn't seem to know... nothing about them, because kung fu teacher? triads? small and sexually-charged Chinese girl? Yeah, sure... Too much wikipedia do I see.
At least if the story was fun and properly written, you could overcame his deficiencies with his vision of Chinese and their culture. But Andreu Martin never learnt the words "suspension of disbelief".
More rotten than the characters in his novel. Bogart must be turning in his grave... And Hammett... And Chandler... And... Well, you get my point.
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