En el nombre del hijo
Durii Editorial · Negra y Thriller · Narrativa · Adultos (+18 años)
Synopsis
In the grey post-war Almería of 1958 and 1959, eight people are murdered with no apparent pattern: Lunares, a prostitute of legendary beauty; Dionisio, a carpenter in love with an impossible love; Antoñito, a boy everyone regarded as something close to a miracle; Manuela, a pregnant mother already widowed; Adolfo, a young man on his first night of love; Carmen, a deeply devout little girl; Lucio, an elderly itinerant cobbler; and Mariana, a woman haunted by superstition. The young inspector Alejandro Santano, newly arrived from Madrid, is the only one willing to stand by an uncomfortable theory: the victims are not chosen at random but for their goodness, and the killer believes himself a redeemer bound to preserve them from the corruption of time. When the Brigada de Investigación Social takes over the case under political pressure, a man with an intellectual disability is imprisoned as a scapegoat, and the killer's true identity is buried in the silence of the person who knew him best: a priest who said nothing for years.
Thirty years later, in Madrid during the Transition, Javier Gaitán, a twenty-eight-year-old journalist, watches his mother die and discovers, in her last words, that he was adopted. Among her belongings is a tin box holding a rosary and an unsigned manuscript: a first-person diary written by that Almería killer, in prose that is unsettlingly lyrical. Unable to sleep without answers, Javier walks away from his job, puts his marriage at risk, and travels to Almería, where he tracks down the man who led the original investigation—now a university lecturer—to reconstruct, piece by piece, the crimes that shaped his origins.
As Javier presses forward, the novel moves between three timeframes—the killer's diary, the police investigation of 1958–1959, and the present of 1987–1988—until they converge in a revelation that ties Javier's fate to one of the victims in a way neither he nor the reader could have anticipated. «En el nombre del hijo» is at once a chronicle of Francoist repression, a study of faith turned to violence, and an inquiry into what it truly means to belong to a family when blood and love do not coincide.
Machine translation, pending review.
Selling points
- Doble línea temporal —1959 y 1987— que entrelaza un caso de asesino en serie con una crisis de identidad contemporánea.
- Estructura narrativa organizada como los libros bíblicos, con el manuscrito del asesino intercalado como diario dentro de la novela.
- Prosa lírica y barroca que combina el rigor del thriller con la densidad poética del autor de «ISHQ».
- Retrato documentado de la represión y la miseria de la Almería de posguerra, con investigación marcada por la corrupción franquista.
- Un antagonista inolvidable: un asesino que mata para 'salvar' a sus víctimas, no por odio sino por fe pervertida.
- Final que revela una conexión genealógica imposible de anticipar entre víctima y protagonista.
- Idóneo para clubes de lectura por sus preguntas sobre identidad, adopción, verdad y justicia.
- Autor con trayectoria previa premiada internacionalmente que se reinventa en el género negro sin perder su voz poética.
Comparable titles
- La cara norte del corazón, Dolores Redondo
- Aquitania, Eva García Sáenz de Urturi
- El paciente silencioso, Alex Michaelides
Technical data
- ISBN
- 978-84-10075-19-1
- Format
- Softcover
- Pages
- 996
- Dimensions
- 152 × 228 mm
- Weight
- 1421 g
- RRP
- €25.00 (VAT included)
- Publication
- 10 April 2025
- Edition
- Edition 3
- Legal deposit
- M-7294-2025
- Language
- spa
- Imprint
- Durii Editorial
- Series
- Negra y Thriller
- Age
- Adultos (+18 años)
- Ebook
- 978-84-10075-20-7 · €8.00
Classification
Thriller psicológico · Novela histórica · Ficción sobre asesinos en serie · Novela de identidad y adopción · Prosa poética narrativa
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.
EN EL NOMBRE DEL HIJO (IN THE NAME OF THE SON) is a literary crime novel that interweaves two timelines: Almería, 1958-1959, in the grey aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Madrid/Almería, 1987-1988, during Spain's fragile transition to democracy. When Javier's dying mother reveals he was adopted, he inherits a small tin box containing a rosary and a manuscript: the diary of a serial killer who, three decades earlier, murdered eight people he believed he was 'redeeming' from moral corruption, each recast as a biblical martyr in his deranged theology. As Javier retraces the investigation of young detective Alejandro Santano, buried under Francoist corruption and a wrongful conviction, both narratives converge toward a genealogical revelation that recontextualizes everything the reader has assumed about guilt, inheritance, and identity. Structured like the books of the Bible, the novel combines the density of literary fiction—rich, almost baroque prose, deeply interior characters—with the propulsive mechanics of a serial-killer thriller and the historical texture of Spain's post-war repression. It has already reached a third printing in the Spanish market within little more than a year of publication, an unusually fast trajectory for literary crime fiction. For international readers, it offers the atmosphere of Umberto Eco's religious-murder puzzles, the historical density of Almudena Grandes, and the psychological unreliability of novels like The Silent Patient, transplanted into the arid, sunburnt landscapes of southern Spain. Its dual-timeline structure and embedded 'manuscript within the novel' device make it especially suited for limited-series television adaptation. We believe it will resonate strongly in markets with an appetite for literary noir with historical weight—France, Italy, Germany, and Latin America in particular.
Juan Andrés Moya Montañez
La Rioja, España · 1981
La Rioja, 1981. A devoted reader of literature, history, art and science, and an admirer of Virginia Woolf, Victor Hugo, Poe and Wilde, Moya Montañez writes with a marked tendency towards introspection and the private inner lives of his characters. After publishing his debut novel, «ISHQ — El color de las granadas», in 2016, and receiving a significant number of awards in international competitions, «En el nombre del hijo» sees him move into intimate crime fiction — without abandoning the poetic musicality that has always defined his work.
Machine translation, pending review.
