Strap yourselves in. This thriller starts off at a frantic pace, and then accelerates. Antonia Scott and Jon Gutiérrez team up again, this time trying to find the wife of an underworld criminal. Lola Moreno has managed to escape after being shot at in a shopping centre, after her husband – and Russian mafia figure – has been shot and killed at their family home. Scott and Gutiérrez are sent to the Costa del Sol to find the missing wife. Antonia Scott is a singular character, with a skyscraper-high IQ and zero people skills. She ‘lives inside the prison of her brain’.
The presence of Scott and Gutiérrez annoys the local police in Málaga. Captain Romero and Deputy Inspector Belgrano are building a case against Aslan Orlov, the kingpin of the Russian mafia. Chasing him for this crime may jeopardise the other. Unknown to the police, Orlov has also requested a female Russian assassin, codenamed Black Wolf, to kill Lola. Black Wolf has her own agenda. Lola is a savvy survivor, using her wits to avoid capture. To complicate matters further, a shipping container with deceased trafficked women and links to the murdered husband is found at the docks.
The twists and turns are plentiful, and the writing is tight. There’s a hangover from the first novel in this series, Red Queen, as Antonia can’t forget that book’s female criminal who escaped justice. The good news is you don’t have to have read that novel to dive into this one. And in even better news, the third book in the trilogy, White King, is also coming soon.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
Read a book review of Red Queen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juan Gómez-Jurado (he/him) is a journalist and novelist, whose Antonia Scott trilogy has now sold more than two million copies in the original Spanish, is being published in seventeen countries, and is currently being adapted by Amazon in a streaming series expected to debut in 2023.
He lives in Madrid, Spain.
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