In the moments I've not been despairing about the global pandemic, I've been finishing off Domingo Villar's 2009 crime novel, La Playa de los Ahogados (literally The Beach of the Drowned, although the English edition was entitled Death on a Galician Shore).

I really enjoyed this book. So much so that I went straight on to buy the sequel, El Ultimo Barco (The Last Boat), which came out last year, a full 10 years after the one I'd just read.

Having recently experienced a taste of Galicia, I particularly enjoyed Villar's atmospheric evocation of his land of origin (the novel was originally written in Galician, and translated into Spanish by the author).

We are introduced to a bleak, rainy, windy, but very beautiful landscape, dominated by the sea. We learn about fishing communities, their superstitions, their boats, their catches, the way those catches are auctioned, the constantly marauding seagulls, the storms...







And the problems, of course. An older local talks of the times when there were dozens of big fishing vessels: "There was no room for the fish in the fish market. There were boxes of hake coming out the door... Then the sea started to dry up. It seems as though it will never run out, but it does run out. Of course it runs out."





Now tourism is an important underpinning for the economy. We hear about the arrival of a liner, disgorging onto the streets of Vigo its cargo of tourists with their maps, macs, and cameras. We hear of the "veraneantes", the summer residents, who migrate back to the cities as soon as the season changes.

Galicians are not the most forthcoming people, Villar would have us believe. His lead character, Inspector Leo Caldas, hails from here. He understands them. But his assistant, Rafael Estevez, who comes from Zaragoza in Aragon, and is a little too free with his fists, can make nothing of them. "You know what these people are like," he complains, still unable, months after his transfer to Galicia, to "get used to the ambiguity with which his new neighbours were wont to express themselves".

The personality of Leo Caldas is intriguing: his love of good Galician food, his penchant for white wine (surely that delicious Albarino we enjoyed so much?), his predisposition to travel sickness, his broken relationship with a woman called Alba, his struggling relationship with his father, his workaholism, the radio programme ("Patrol on the Radio Waves") that he despises but can never escape from, his unbreakable smoking habit -- all these details make him an interesting, sympathetic, and very credible character.

And the case, which concerns the murder of a fisherman, offers a looming, gathering, haunting story, with twists and turns to the very end. No gimmicks, no melodrama, no pyrotechnics, just a careful peeling back of the layers until the solution is revealed.

Bravo.