The first meeting of the Los Libros Dorados book club was supposed to be an opportunity to talk about books, share their thoughts, and breathe new life into Elena’s bookshop. However, the conversation is interrupted by a guest who is incapable of waiting for his turn to speak: the body of a U.S. journalist.
What at first looks like an asthma attack very soon starts to look like a murder. And in Montealto, a peaceful village near Valladolid, there is no need to look very far to find the suspects. Secrets travel quickly, grudges have been collecting dust for years, and almost everyone has a reason to want the past to remain buried.
In Muerte en el club de lectura (Murder in the Book Club) by Ana González Duque, Elena must put the pieces of the puzzle together with the help of writer Horacio León and a black cat who probably knows more than he is willing to reveal, like any self-respecting literary feline. As the investigation unfolds, perfect façades start to crack, and the members of the club discover that sharing books does not mean sharing the truth.
The novel gathers some of the best ingredients of a cozy crime: a village where everyone knows one another, a bookshop turned into a crime scene, an investigation surrounded by suspicion, and an amateur main character forced to see her neighbours in a new light. All this with echoes of Agatha Christie’s classic mysteries and a question that makes it un-put-downable: which reader should never have entered Los Libros Dorados?
Ana González Duque is very familiar with book clubs: she runs Lectoria, one of Spain’s largest online book clubs. She also runs Marketing Online Para Escritores, the blog El fogón, and the podcast El Escritor Emprendedor. Before dedicating herself entirely to fiction, she worked as an anaesthesiologist or, in her own words, «putting people to sleep.» In 2017, she hung up her scrubs to focus on writing and helping other authors make a living out of their books.
This time, she decided to bring her two worlds—writers and readers—together and lock them up in a bookshop with a murderer. Not the wisest choice for the residents of Montealto, but irresistible to those who enjoy trying to solve a crime before the protagonists do.
Muerte en el club de lectura is now available in bookshops. Anyone visiting Los Libros Dorados should keep their eyes open. In this book club, discussing the book is optional. Getting out alive, not so much.
