El puerto del silencio
Durii Editorial · Negra y Thriller · Narrativa · Adultos (+18 años)
Synopsis
Hugo Vadell was a police officer, a homicide inspector in Madrid, until he found Oliver's body—his partner—naked and covered in bruises on a pavement in El Viso after an overdose at a party no one wanted to discuss. Ten years after leaving Portocolom, he returns to Mallorca for Christmas with no suitcase, just a rucksack, ready to vanish from the world for a while. But his family—an absent father in the building trade, an exquisite and controlling mother, a younger brother he barely knows—offers none of the refuge he had hoped for, only a different silence: older, woven across generations.
The same Christmas Eve Hugo arrives, his brother Alberto is hurt in a road accident that no one can quite explain. The following day, posters go up across the village: Sara Bustos, eighteen years old, daughter of the owner of the island's most important dairy farm, has disappeared after a party. Sergeant Juan Roig, who has never handled anything like this, calls on Hugo's experience for an off-the-books investigation. What begins as a way of escaping his own grief becomes a descent: a mechanic being blackmailed by Sara, a jealous ex-boyfriend, an artist who keeps mutilated mannequins in his garden, and, above all, a suspicion that grows harder to sidestep—that Alberto was the last person to see her alive.
As Hugo follows the thread, he comes to understand that his own mother, Cecilia, holds the keys to far more than the old family farmhouse where he played as a child. Through old photographs, a mayor who fled the village forty years ago, and the unsolved disappearance of another girl in the 1980s, Hugo will discover that the true monster in his family is not who he suspected, and that the meaning of protecting your own can become indistinguishable from destroying them. El puerto del silencio alternates Hugo's confessional voice with Juan's perspective—a man carrying his own childhood secret—and with the final days of Sara and Alberto, in a structure that tightens its circle until an ending that forces the question of who decides, within a family, which truths deserve to come to light. It is a novel about inherited guilt, about what is left unspoken in order to survive within a community, and about the price of a childhood kept safe through lies.
Machine translation, pending review.
Selling points
- Protagonista gay que investiga sin salir del armario emocional, uniendo crimen y duelo íntimo.
- Doble trama que entrelaza una desaparición actual con un encubrimiento de abusos de hace cuarenta años.
- Retrato despiadado de una familia acomodada mallorquina que antepone la reputación a la verdad.
- Estructura coral con giro final que resignifica cada capítulo anterior.
- Ambientación en la Mallorca de invierno, lejos del tópico turístico, como personaje silencioso.
- Elemento simbólico abierto (la esfera) que deja la puerta abierta a una posible continuación.
Comparable titles
- Un amor, Sara Mesa
- La Bestia, Carmen Mola
- Local Woman Missing, Mary Kubica
- The Push, Ashley Audrain
Technical data
- ISBN
- 978-84-10075-80-1
- Format
- Softcover
- Pages
- 368
- Dimensions
- 144 × 233 mm
- Weight
- 500 g
- RRP
- €22.00 (VAT included)
- Publication
- 17 September 2026
- Edition
- Edition 1
- Legal deposit
- M-21596-2026
- Language
- spa
- Imprint
- Durii Editorial
- Series
- Negra y Thriller
- Age
- Adultos (+18 años)
- Ebook
- 978-84-10075-81-8 · €8.00
Classification
thriller psicológico · novela negra · drama familiar · misterio rural
For bookshops and distributors
The price shown includes VAT. Trade terms and orders are in the
Distribution: Azeta in Spain · Panoplia de Libros in Latin America · Direct distribution from the publisher
Rights
Translation rights available for all languages.
EL PUERTO DEL SILENCIO (THE HARBOUR OF SILENCE) is a literary psychological thriller set in a wind-battered off-season Mallorca, far from the postcard island of tourist brochures. Hugo Vadell, a disgraced homicide inspector grieving the drug-related death of his partner, retreats to the fishing village he fled a decade earlier, only to be drawn into the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl on Christmas Eve — the same night his estranged younger brother suffers an unexplained car accident. As Hugo assists the local Guardia Civil off the record, the investigation closes in on his own family: a controlling, image-obsessed mother; a silent, complicit father; and a forty-year-old cover-up involving a celebrated artist, a disgraced mayor, and a child-protection charity that hid unspeakable abuse. Told through alternating perspectives — Hugo's confessional first person, the sergeant's own buried childhood trauma, and flashback chapters revealing the missing girl's final hours — the novel builds toward a devastating twist that recontextualises every chapter that came before. José Redondo, also an award-winning screenwriter, brings cinematic, slow-burn tension to a story about families that survive by lying, small communities that protect predators through collective silence, and the unbearable cost of postponed truths. Comparable to the atmospheric small-town mysteries of Mary Kubica and the moral complexity of Carmen Mola, with the literary ambition of Sara Mesa, this novel offers international publishers a commercially hooky premise wrapped in genuinely literary prose and an unflinching, adult exploration of abuse, addiction, and inherited guilt. It also features a gay protagonist portrayed with full interiority, broadening its appeal to LGBTQ+ readers without making that the story's central issue. Rights are available in all territories.
