The Foreign Girls

by Olguin Sergio, France Miranda (Translator)

Overview

Verónica Rosenthal has retreated to a cousin’s remote cottage in the province of Tucumán, to recuperate from the traumatic events in The Fragility of Bodies. She befriends two female tourists –an Italian and a Norwegian-- invites them to stay and starts a sexual relationship with one of them. After a party they attend together, Verónica travels on alone but days later discovers that the women have been murdered. Suspicion falls on a local Umbanda priest, but Verónica starts to uncover a web of corruption, abuse and femicide in which government, wealthy landowners and a high-ranking official from Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ are all implicated. Verónica’s investigation, with its unforeseen political dimensions, has alarmed new enemies who will try to stop her at all cost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913394394
Publisher:	Bitter Lemon Press, Ltd
Publication date:	03/23/2021
Series:	Veronica Rosenthal Mystery , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	577 KB

About the Author

Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967 and was a journalist before turning to fiction. Olguín has won a number of awards, among others the Premio Tusquets 2009 for his novel Oscura monótona sangre (“Dark Monotonous Blood“) His books have been translated into German, French and Italian. The Fragility of Bodies and The Foreign Girls are his first novels to be translated into English.
The translator Miranda France is the author of two acclaimed volumes of travel writing: Don Quixote's Delusions and Bad Times in Buenos Aires. She has also written the novels Hill Farm and The Day Before the Fire and translated much Latin American fiction, including Claudia Piñeiro’s novels for Bitter Lemon Press.

Editorial Reviews

Reviews Fragility of Bodies

Kirkus:
But the story is so gripping and Veronica is such a fascinating departure from crime fiction convention—she's 30, Jewish, brazen, and openly flawed—that the book becomes difficult to put down. Also a very good novel about journalism, it's the first installment of a trilogy. An unusual,
intoxicating thriller from Argentina that casts deeper and deeper shadows.

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review:
A scalding crime novel set in Buenos Aires. Olguín memorably explores the gulf between the haves and have-nots of her city. Readers will hope to see more of the complex Verónica. (Oct.)

Financial Times:
ONE OF THREE BEST THRILLERS OF 2019: The late, great foreign correspondent
Nicholas Tomalin once opined that a journalist needed three qualities to succeed: “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability”. Verónica Rosenthal, the protagonist with a chaotic personal life of Olguín’s lively new thriller The Fragility of Bodies, has these in spades.

Olguín is a fine writer with an easy style, aided by a very readable translation by Miranda France. This is the first of a trilogy featuring
Rosenthal who pursues her leads with courage and determination, as she digs into a suicide that quickly morphs into a deadly conspiracy. The series has already been turned into a television series and I’m looking forward to the next volume.

CrimeReview:
This is an excellent story, well told and translated, which sustains a high level of tension throughout. The reader is well aware of the risks to
Veronica and those she co-opts in her research, and these culminate in violent and gripping action. In the background we have Buenos Aires, with great disparities of wealth and prevalent corruption, but a strong sense of life being lived to the full.

NB Magazine:
The Fragility of Bodies is a powerful tale of murder and corruption set in
Buenos Aires; it feels troublingly plausible. It will thrill readers with a taste for dark, gritty, real-world crime fiction. This novel is distilled single malt noir, a gripping reflection on the woes and angst of
Argentinian society.

SHOTS Magazine:
This is how I like my noir fiction: no cops with unlikely hang-ups, no copycat serial killers, no ‘here-we-go-again’ plots. Olguín concentrates instead on villains and victims and several dollops of savage sex.

From the Publisher