This debut noir by Maria Oruna was published in 2015. She is Galician (born in 1976 in Vigo), and was a lawyer before turning to writing.

Set in Cantabria, it is the first in a series comprising five books (with one more definitely on the way), and it has been translated into German, French, Catalan, Russian, Polish, Italian, and Greek -- but not, as far as I can tell, into English. Which is surprising, given that it seems to have sold really well.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but before I explain why, we need a quick note on the title. In Spanish it is called "Puerto escondido", which literally means "hidden port". The French and Italian versions have opted for something almost literal: The Secret Port. But "port" in English, I think, implies something with much more infrastructure than the place described in the book. Nor do these phrases really get to the bottom of the meaning that is developed in the course of the story. Which is possibly why the German version has eschewed the port thing altogether, and gone out on a limb with The Sisters' Promise...

The "puerto escondido" in question is a place recalled by Oliver Gordon, a young man who is half-Spanish/half-English, and has returned to Cantabria after a series of tragedies (his mother has been killed in a road accident, his brother has disappeared, and he is no longer with his girlfriend, for reasons we don't discover until the end). He has memories of a quiet, secluded place where his Spanish grandparents used to take the boys to play -- a place "where they were invulnerable, and time had stopped".

Lieutenant Valentina Redondo, our Galician-born police lead, muses at one point: "She too would like to have her own puerto escondido, her place of rest and moderation, where she can relax her senses and the high demands she makes on herself; a place where she can collapse on the grass, look up at the sky, and do all that with child-like nonchalance." And the author, in the afterword, expresses the hope that "all who have finished this book will have been able to visit, even if unintentionally, their own secret puerto escondido".

Bearing all that in mind, if I were translating this book, I'd opt to entitle it Secret Haven, which expresses the idea of something tucked away, personal, special, and safe.


We spent some time in the area around Santillana del Mar and Comillas in 1994

Anyway, it's a great read. Oliver, having inherited from his late mother a property known as Villa Marina, overlooking the beach in Suances, has plans to embark on a new life by converting it for the use of guests. In the process of renovating the basement, however, the workmen find the mummified body of a newborn baby, which turns out to date back to the late 1940s, and is accompanied by a strange Aztec figurine that no-one can quite place. These circumstances themselves would probably not arouse too much of a sense of urgency among the police, but suddenly more corpses start popping up, and they all seem to have some connection with Villa Marina and its newly exposed secret.

The narration proceeds along two timelines. One, contemporary and third-person, follows the process of the investigation step by step. This is done really well. No dull moments, and definitely keeps you turning the pages. The other account, written in the first person by a narrator who has a bit of a gift for obfuscation, and whose identity is not revealed until the end, covers the decade starting in the late 1930s, when life in Spain was profoundly marked by the civil war and its immediate aftermath. This historical journal is interleaved with the investigation, and as the two start to converge, we have plenty to guess at and puzzle over.

This historical strand (meticulously researched) is also very evocative. What terrible times... We see our lead family forced to run to the mountain caves on multiple occasions to avoid aerial attack, but still suffering the death of the mother and youngest son. We see the remaining children parcelled out to various family members, as Dad can no longer cope with a full-time job, his farming responsibilities, and a household. Life is unremitting work, and hunger is never far away. Nor did things get better when the civil war was over. The aftermath was a cruel and miserable period, with hundreds of republicans taking to the mountains to avoid reprisals, or hidden away using various subterfuges and disguises. Shortages continued (rationing went on until 1951), and it is easy to understand the lengths people might go to in order to finally break free of poverty.

There is a strong implication that these sufferings were the trigger for the psychopathic tendencies of our villain, and this looming, brooding note is introduced and then amplified to great effect.



This is very much a multi-media novel. Not only do we have our two converging timelines, but we are also fed plot clues by way of epigraphs (with their references to psychopaths, mysteries, bodies, greed, disappointment, sight, and death) and character clues by way of song titles (there's a complete play-list here).

Needless to say, our lead detective has a dark past and more than a few character flaws. But the interaction among the team members is quite humorous at times.

And playing its own role in the evocation of atmosphere is the region of Cantabria. The settings, clearly but not laboriously described, definitely make you want to go back for another look, especially as the municipalities of Suances, Comillas, and Santillana del Mar have drawn up a helpful "Ruta Literaria", with photos, text extracts, and a map of places to visit. In the meantime, while we await a return visit, here are some photos of places mentioned in the story.

Curiously, Oruna modelled Villa Marina on a house she had seen but never entered. She was invited to visit after the publication of the novel, and was surprised how accurately she had managed to describe it. Sadly, it suffered fire damage in 2020, but here is how it looked before that. The initial murder, which kicks off all the succeeding trauma, is also based on an actual incident, which took place in Ubiarco in 1953.


I always have my favourite houses too...

It's not a perfect novel. The revelatory suicide note at the end is a slightly thin plot device, and I feel our psychopath would actually have been more believable if he/she had not wrought quite so much mayhem.

The bottom line, though, is that I'll definitely be reading the next one... Not to mention hoping to go back to Cantabria.