Cónsul

Synopsis

In November 1807, Hugo de Orduña returns to the Royal Palace in Madrid for the first time in a decade. The son of the Count and Countess of Monfor, executed for high treason when he was eighteen, Hugo has built his life far from the nobility: first as a pressed seaman in the Armada, where he fought at Trafalgar, then as a rootless soldier with no family name worth claiming. When Prince Ferdinand offers him an ultra-secret mission as consul in New Spain—charged with investigating rumours of misrule and the possible loss of the empire's richest colony—Hugo accepts. It is his last chance to clear a name he should never have had to bear.

In Mexico City, Hugo finds a viceroyalty seething beneath its surface. Viceroy Miguel de Talamar is an easily manipulated figurehead; his wife, María Godoy, and the Catalan merchant Carles Montenou pull the real strings of a power sustained by bribes, repression and a secret alliance with French mercenaries. Meanwhile, a series of murders targeting mestiza women spreads terror through the city, and a group of rebels led by Raúl Ceballos, a mestizo landowner, is trying to push back against colonial injustice.

It is Raúl's daughter, Camila Ceballos, who changes the course of Hugo's mission. Intelligent, untameable and deeply committed to her people, Camila is suspicious at first of everything the newcomer represents. But as Hugo begins his investigation—infiltrating the palace offices, coaxing information from the viceroy's own wife, stealing compromising documents in the dead of night—the two of them discover they are on the same side of a far larger war than either had imagined: Napoleon is preparing to invade Spain, and the viceroyalty is just one piece on a board that involves treachery on both sides of the ocean.

The alliance between Hugo and the rebels comes at a steep price. Héctor Arriaga, the group's former leader and Camila's childhood friend, eaten up by jealousy and ambition, ends up selling them out to the enemy, setting off a chain of betrayals, torture and deaths that will test everything Hugo thought he knew about honour, loyalty and love. Through public executions, impossible escapes and the growing certainty that time is running out, Hugo and Camila must decide what they are prepared to sacrifice—and whom they are prepared to protect—before the entire empire collapses.

Cónsul is an adventure novel that spans two continents and a crucial decade in history, combining the pace of the classic serial with a love story that begins, precisely, at the worst possible moment to fall in love.

Machine translation, pending review.