Claudia Piñeiro

A unique tale that interweaves crime fiction with intimate tales of morality and search for individual freedom. After Rita is found dead in the bell tower of the church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

After twenty years, a woman returns to the suburban Argentina she had fled to escape a dreadful accident, a sense of guilt, and social condemnation, leaving her son behind. But the woman who returns is not the same: she doesn't look the same, her voice is different, she doesn't even have the same name. After two decades spent in the United States, this damaged woman has rebuilt her life. Will those who knew her even recognise her? Will he recognise her? Not fully understanding her own reasons for going back to the place where she once lived and raised a family, and that she had been determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps her return is nothing more than a little luck…

Life after crime from the Booker International finalist author of Elena Knows. Fifteen years after poisoning her husband’s lover, Ines is released from prison and left to put together a life. Her old friend Manca is out now too, and they decide to work together in pest control. But Señora Bonar, one of their clients, wants them to do more than kill bugs―she wants their expertise, and their criminal pasts, to help her kill her husband’s lover, too. Marital abuse, crimes against women, and crimes by women, worlds upended, mothers and daughters―this is classic Piñeiro, alive to all the ways institutions set us up to fail and to fail each other.