Search results for ""Author Guillermo Valcárcel""

Rare antiquities, forgery, betrayal, and murder. It’s all part of the game. Antique salvager, counterfeiter, and former art forger Jota knows his newest commission pays suspiciously well, but it’s too easy to turn down. All he has to do is find an old clock that apparently has disappeared after being sold in the auction of a bankrupt estate. In Madrid’s El Rastro market, where whisper networks of shady and ambitious hustlers promise generous rewards for minimal favors, what sounds too good to be true usually is, but the last thing Jota is expecting to uncover is his own past. His investigation draws him back into a circle of old acquaintances—including Diego, his former partner in crime, and Diego’s daughter, Laura. When Diego shows interest in the seemingly worthless clock, Laura’s curiosity is piqued, and when he’s killed in connection with the timepiece, she becomes obsessed with finding his murderers. Together Laura and Jota set out to hunt for the mysterious memento, but they have little idea just how much danger they’re in. The deeper they go, the darker, and bloodier, things get. In a world this deceptive and mazelike—a world Jota knows all too well—the only thing he and Laura can trust in is their instinct for survival.

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A man’s search for a missing girl leads him across borders and through a landscape of urban violence in this timely, propulsive, and brilliantly imagined thriller. Ethan is living a solid, rational life as a bail bondsman in Florida when he’s compelled to make a seemingly irrational decision: abandon his job and his girlfriend and head south to rescue the daughter of his ex-lover, Michelle. She appears to have been kidnapped by the Mara—vicious street gangs ripping apart the fabric of Central American life—and there’s every reason to believe the girl is dead already. Except for the one that Ethan has been hiding from everyone: she is calling to him in his dreams with three desperate words…I’m still alive. What begins as an urgent mission to save her soon pulls Ethan into a subterranean culture of fear, corruption, and human trafficking with a surreal connection to the most unspeakable crimes of the twentieth century. Suddenly Ethan’s past has come back to haunt him—especially his relationship with Michelle and a passion that was as dangerous as it was intoxicating. Now, heeding impossible cries for help from a lost child, Ethan embarks on a journey that devolves from dreamscape to a nightmare from which there may be no return.

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