Galego | English

Fiction

A xeada negra

By Xoán Ramón Díaz

About this book

A xeada negra narrates in three parts the same number of adventures of a multifaceted character, a retired private detective (Manolo Meiriño) along with his peculiar “assistant” (Gaiarre). The scenario for the investigation is mostly Lugo and its surroundings where the characters that take part are usually enigmatic and confusing. This is an action novel full of mystery and enigmas in which the author makes use of a very fluid and lively prose.

In the words of the author himself, this is a “mystery novel with a dispassionate and crude vision of Spanish history in the 20th century”, “a metaphor of a society in decay”.

Book fragment

The cold had invaded him, along with the night, and caused a non-stop agitation in his whole body. He shivered with a convoluted trembling of fever. Gaiarre was not of much help. Without lights, without lighted shop-windows, without alighted windows, they tumbled through the night crossing the slums. They walked down a street that was no more than a project. A stripe of flat land, surrounded by barren fields, unkempt, that cherished, along with the thirst of the greedy and the speculator on their wild back, the happy moment they became plots for housing developments. More than once they rolled down to the trenches, full of weed, humid and frozen due to that bloody frost, that bloody black frost that burns everything and is never seen.

-Bloody hell! –Meiriño shouted with his trembling and broken voice- Look over there, Gaiarre! The sky, do you see it? It is opening like a dark mouth!