Translated by Nick Caistor — White King concludes Spanish crime author Juan Gómez-Jurado’s the popular trilogy featuring Antonia Scott, which was adapted for television in Amazon’s Red Queen series last year. Is it a goodbye the brilliant but asocial investigator and her witty sidekick, Jon Gutiérrez?
White King picks up where book two, Black Wolf, left off and we’re thrown head-first into the action. Across Europe, someone is targeting and killing off members of Red Queen, a secret and experimental police unit led by a man called Mentor. Antonia’s son and grandmother are shipped off to South America for their own safety, but Jon Gutiérrez, Antonia’s police partner, is kidnapped. When he is returned, he’s a ticking bomb – literally. An explosive has been attached to his spinal column.
Four years earlier, someone broke into Antonia’s home, injuring her and her husband, Marcos. Marcos’ injuries were so severe that he’s been in a coma ever since. Antonia believes the elusive Mr White is responsible for her husband’s condition and has been hunting him down since that day. But now it is he who has found her. Mr White is a perilous man who can make any murder look like an accident. He’s also skilled at finding someone’s weakness and using it to his advantage. He knows Antonia’s Achilles’ heel – it’s Jon.
White gives Antonia an ultimatum. She must solve three crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice within a limited time or the bomb in Jon’s spine will be detonated. And so the race against time, in true action movie style, begins. The partnership between Jon and Antonia is stretched to its limits as they try to solve these crimes while pinpointing what connects them.
First up is Raquel Planas Mengual, an interior designer who was stabbed to death four years earlier. Her boyfriend, Victor Blasquez, a man with a history of domestic abuse, was convicted and is serving 23 years in prison. But is Victor the real killer, or was he framed? Now a computer engineer who had a connection to Raquel has turned up dead. As Jon wryly quips: “Investigating a cold case is like eating soup with a machete. It’s difficult, challenging and guaranteed to leave you needing stitches.”
White manipulates Jon and Antonia like puppets and they begin to think he might not want them to solve these cases and is just be looking for an excuse to kill them. Fortunately, Antonia has her own game plan. She’s learnt to tame the “crazy monkeys” swinging around in her head. She’s trained them to draw her attention to the details and is no longer dependent on the red pills to keep her focused.
Jon constantly has to remind himself that Antonia is an anomaly. She has zero discretion in social situations, is as subtle as a flamethrower, and has no sense of humour. He employs a series of emotionally intelligent strategies to direct her in the basic rules of human communication – for example, that people can’t read your mind – with varying success. She remains impossible to figure out. Like building a jigsaw puzzle in the dark without the photo on the box.
Nonetheless, they make a good pair and rely on each other. The only drawback is their track record with the destruction of Red Queen’s Audis. Antonia’s ignorance of the highway code has resulted in the loss of many side mirrors and €300,000 worth of damage between them.
Questions asked throughout the series will finally be answered and loose ends are tied up in this concluding story. These resolutions leave both Antonia and the reader wondering, “What next?” Now, most of all, she wishes she had a family where she could take refuge and hide when life gets too much.
White King has an intricate, fast-moving plot which never drags or lags – there’s too much going on. And in the midst of the action, there are luminous moments of humour. It’s firmly tongue-in-cheek. When Antonia interviews a suspect, she turns around while walking away in pure Columbo style, saying, “One last thing…” We can only hope that Gómez also pulls a Columbo on us and returns with another novel featuring these two flawed, but endearing characters. White King might not end with a cliffhanger, but it does end in a way which keeps the possibility open.
For more crime fiction by Spanish authors see My Favourite Scar by Nicholas Ferraro or The Transparency of Time by Leonardo Padura.
Pan Macmillan
Print/Kindle/iBook
£11.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
