First published 2013
María Dolz sits in the same Madrid café each morning, watching a couple she has never met. She imagines their perfect marriage lifts her from her own mundane routine. She creates stories about their happiness from across the room. Then someone murders the husband brutally. María visits the widow to express sympathy. At their home, she encounters a man who reveals shocking details about the crime. She falls in love with him despite what he tells her about the murder. María tries to understand what really happened, but the truth shifts each time she examines it. The investigation becomes her obsession. She questions whether love blinds people to reality. She wonders if coincidence shapes lives more than choice. The murder mystery transforms into something deeper as María struggles with what she believes versus what she knows.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Madrid
Period: 21st-century
352 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: murder