For the life of me, I can't remember where I first heard of Reyes Calderon, the author of this novel (published in 2016, and the sixth in a series featuring Spanish Supreme Court Justice Lola MacHor). The Spanish title is Dispara a la luna, and to my knowledge none of Calderon's work has been translated into English.

Calderon is another of those amazing author/academics. She studied Economics and Philosophy, is currently a professor at the University of Navarra, and has nine children. Which perhaps explains why she mostly writes at night, but doesn't really explain why she writes with a pen. A pen?

And, as the printed edition runs to over 600 pages, this is a lot of pen... Much of the account is Lola's first-person narrative, and her style is racy and quite colloquial, so it took me a little while to work my way into it. But once adjusted, I was swept along. She's irreverent, self-deprecating, and funny, with a great turn of phrase (examples: "His tie is as lopsided as the tongue of a greyhound chasing a hare"; or "His hairpiece moves around his head with the ease of a rich Arab in Marbella," which sounds kind of politically incorrect, but does have a basis in fact).

As Calderon explains: "What matters to me is not how I write but who I write for. For this reason, I review what I have written a thousand and one times, I personally go through all the scenarios, and I surround myself with blessed and generous friends: judges, coroners, civil guards, police officers, prosecutors, or doctors, who polish the various edges of my ideas and compensate for my clumsiness." Certainly, she gives every impression of having rigorously researched the murky world of Shoot for the Moon, which features a Spanish Interpol officer kidnapped on French soil, Spanish police operating over the border with below-the-radar French colleagues, Basque political entanglement, Spanish and French political interest, British intelligence involvement, and everyone determined to deny everything.


Irun, in the province of Gipuzkoa in the Basque Autonomous Community, Spain, 2020

I liked the structure, which starts with the end, at the point where Juan Iturri, the kidnapped officer, is rescued, alive but in very bad condition, and where a dead body is also found. All is pretty opaque at this stage, partly because Lola doesn't know what's going on, and partly because she can't divulge what's going on to the local police (not in on the international intrigue). Because of the political interests at stake, everything has to be deniable, so the death will be hushed up as "suicide", although anyone who has seen the body knows that to be quite impossible...

Then we cycle back to put the pieces together. And it's a great plot. We meet Xabier Gortari, orphaned at an early age, and subsequently sucked into the meshes of ETA ("La Organizacion", as it's mostly called). The group becomes a surrogate family, and he works for them, making explosives that are very successful in their goals. But he then repents, denounces the whole enterprise, and is expelled. So when he ends up in prison, and commits suicide, and a somewhat unhinged fellow-inmate not only arranges his corpse to look as though he's been murdered, but also discloses the resultant photos to the young man's brother and sister, Joseba and Anne, a whole cycle of revenge and tragedy is set in motion... Joseba is convinced that ETA has bumped off his brother (who was equally convinced of the existence of a mole within the ranks), and he's determined to hold someone to account, and to locate that someone by means of Iturri. So that's an interesting scenario. The whole thing turns on an error, a misunderstanding. Perception is reality.

Also interesting is the kidnapping. It looks like ETA. But ETA are no longer kidnapping... Or are they? Is the truce going belly-up? Or maybe it's a rogue faction? Or something different entirely? The police don't know for sure, and there are political implications to all these possibilities. So, the novel is an interesting exploration of the curveball type of situation that can arise in post-conflict environments.

Lola becomes involved in all this because Iturri, as soon as he realizes he is in danger, sends her a text message with just two names. Armed only with that information, and a sense that something is wrong, she manages to shoulder her way into the tight government circles that are busily trying to contain the potential political fallout of an ETA breach. Employing an inimitable blend of brashness and guile, she becomes part of the covert Spanish team that is sent to investigate (working against the clock, of course, as the kidnappers have sent a list of demands to the Spanish Government that have to be met within a certain time).



This is very definitely not cosy crime... With Iturri overpowered, imprisoned in a tiny closet, and subjected to increasingly vicious treatment, I wondered if I was going to have to skip chapters. But the narrative is finely tuned. You get enough detail to be horrified, but not enough to make you feel you have to avert your eyes completely.

I agree with a number of other readers that the finale is slightly frustrating (sample moan: "The ending left me cold, and there are unresolved issues that could have been dealt with in a few more pages"). Yes, it would absolutely have been nice to have a more extended epilogue, that more overtly tied up some of the loose ends. I felt I had to reread some bits, and I think I eventually sorted everything out, but a bit more spoon-feeding would have been welcome. What the epilogue does do, however, is show that the odious Joseba receives his punishment, albeit of an extra-judicial nature. (Now a leading light among Basque radicals, he is the one who gives us the title: "Think big," he says, "Look to the future. Look up, and shoot for the moon." And then he's shot...)

The character of Lola is very engaging. She's from Bilbao, and spent her childhood there, but she speaks only fragments of Basque. She's proud of her Irish heritage (which goes back to the 16th or 17th century, we're told, when her Catholic ancestors fled to Spain), but of course it makes her doubly suspicious in the eyes of certain authority figures. She's an all-or-nothing person, passionate, feisty, stubborn, and outspoken. She's a very human figure -- she worries because her red hair goes frizzy in damp weather; she struggles with her weight ("I think I was born on a diet"); she's often the polar opposite of elegant. Even though she's obviously a successful professional, she doesn't take herself too seriously. And despite her courage, she's not always buoyant, and sometimes has to wrestle with fears of the future. All in all, she's very credible and likeable.

Her (non-romantic) relationship with Juan Iturri, the kidnapped officer, has obviously developed over the previous books of the series, and it's an odd one, which no-one totally understands, including her: "Love-hate. Hate-love... A strange, peculiar, unique friendship. An almost otherworldly connection." Lola is married, to Jaime, an eminent doctor, and their marriage at this point seems reasonably solid, although Jaime is a bit bewildered by his wife's strange bond with Iturri -- and there's also this point of doubt, which emerges in the course of the story, and is not entirely explained by the end (so we suspect it's preparing the way, TV-serial-like, for the next volume).

According to Jeffrey Oxford, Calderon created Lola because she saw the need for "a realistic female protagonist, not men disguised as females", and her use of a first-person female narrator is the element that most clearly differentiates her work from other popular Spanish detective fiction.

I'd come back for more. Definitely.