'The president': Valencian politician dies alone at night in a Madrid hotel

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You have to take a couple of detours to explain

, by Alicia Giménez Bartlett (Alfaguara).

At the center of her intrigue is a Valencian politician who wears pearls, is overweight, is charismatic, is a drinker, is a smoker, is angry, is foul-mouthed, is a lesbian, is funny and is hyper-competitive;

She is in the middle of a network of corruption in which her role is confused, she

.

In case someone is missing clues, the president, the novel's victim, is called Vita Castellá.

"I will only answer you about Rita Barberá if you

where they would take me for saying that I was inspired by her for this novel," says Alicia Giménez Bartlett, the author of the

series .

Petra is not the detective who meets Vita Castellá but two new characters, the sisters Berta and Marta Miralles, detectives aged 30 and 32, town girls and debutant police officers.

They live together in Valencia and get along badly and well at the same time, like all brothers.

Their bosses order them to investigate the death of the president in the hope that they are two idiots incapable of reaching any conclusion.

And, the truth is, Berta and Marta do sometimes seem a bit silly.

At each step they take in their investigation, they ask themselves

, and after each interrogation they quarrel: "But, why do you say anything, aunt?".

But they are also persevering and fast learners, and even though their bosses do their best to sabotage their work,

.

In one of his investigations, Brenda appears in the book,

during his last months.

In reality, Brenda attended politics informally and agreed to an intimacy impossible for the rest of the world.

In her statement to the Miralles sisters, Brenda says that Castellá's problem was that she had a very painful need to be loved.

Like all but much more.

And that this need had led her to tolerate the corruption of her collaborators because the gifts were her way of calming her addiction to love and acceptance: now I'll let you organize a Formula One championship in Valencia, now I'll make you TV director autonomous community, now I pretend I don't know about your embezzlement or your huge and tacky chalet.

Brenda's statement is ultimately the center of

.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett.ÁNGEL NAVARRETE

"Vita did not get rich. It is said of her in the novel that she had a house in the town and lived for rent in Valencia. Her tastes were simple, to have a beer anywhere. She was not a corrupt woman but she allowed corruption, even organized, mafia corruption,

. She needed everyone to love her and obey her. She was at the center of a criminal network but did not benefit from it, "explains Giménez Bartlett.

"Many politicians work like this, they are more hungry for power than for money. What is more dangerous? I don't know. The hunger for power can be devastating, it can make an entire community believe that everything is possible and acceptable."

What does

look like ?

To the previous novels by Alicia Giménez Bartlett, of course: "This novel is

, like those of Petra Delicado."

And it's true:

is a funny novel in many pages.

The Miralles sisters are funny because they are like Buster Keaton, dumb and smart at the same time.

In addition, they are accompanied by Boro, a homosexual Sancho, in love and a drinker who gives an air of classic comedy to any scene in which he appears.

His characters have nicknames like El Mariconet, they eat baked rice, they get drunk on town promenades, they laugh a lot, they love their parents and they say "how good it is to live here, aunt".

But

is also a kind of compassionate counterpoint to

, by Rafael Chirbes.

If Chirbes's novel tended to see society as a body in which cancer has spread to the last cell, Giménez Bartlet explains that even in that "they are all chorizos" there are nuances.

.

Vita Castellá, in her last hours, is aware of the wrong done by omission and suffers for it.

"At the time of the great corruption I still lived in Barcelona, ​​but I was already spending the weekends in Vinarós (Castellón). In Barcelona, ​​people told me

. The discredit was terrible. The Valencians were considered a gang of robbers," explains Giménez Bartlett.

"Of course that image was not fair. But

... A politician arrived and stole the subsidy that was going to the third world... What else could happen? That the Pope come? Well yes, the Pope came and they also took the opportunity to take his slice. There are images from history that have been left out of this book because they were not credible. That walk in Camps and Rita Barberá in a convertible Porsche...

There is something else to tell about

: the evil that the Miralles sisters face,

.

His victims and his accomplices call him that:

, as if no one specifically murders.

"Corruption is the evil that affects politics, it is the abstract evil that appears whenever power appears. In Valencia, the power of a party was so total, it branched out so much, that it destroyed the moral environment of an entire community" .

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