The Corner

Three deaths on one city block. Nobody saw anything. Everybody knew something.

Mateo Quispe, an architect, flies home from Madrid to Vicente López, on the northern edge of Buenos Aires, to spend a few days with the aunt and uncle who raised him. That first night, in the kitchen behind the fish shop, his uncle Aurelio keeps gripping a new wooden crucifix and lets slip a sentence he won't explain: "Some debts get paid late, nephew." By three in the morning he is dead. Seafood poisoning, says the coroner. It happens to the best fishmonger in the world.

Mateo should go back to Madrid, where Lola closed a door very quietly and gave him seven days. But there was a slip of paper with an address in the dead man's pocket, and in a shoebox, a photo from a hotel in Curitiba and a parish receipt for a Mass said for a dead man no one in the family had ever heard of.

The corner on Belgrano Street has a fish shop, a hair salon and a greengrocer's. Across the road, a supermarket chain squeezing the owners to sell. Behind it, a developer who wants thirty floors. A journalist on a freelancer's wage, a councilman who isn't a bad man - which makes it worse - and a prosecutor who doesn't work with "true," only with "chargeable." And three widows who hold each other up and keep repeating the same thing: don't sell.

What Mateo is going to find isn't at the prosecutor's office or in the tower's blueprints. It's twenty-two years back, at a card table in a hotel in Brazil, in a notebook with three addresses, and in a debt that three decent men paid in three different ways: one with guilt, one with fear, one with indifference.

And the one who pays with indifference is the worst.

A crime novel with no police in it - short chapters, thriller pace - about what decent people do with the things they know and would rather not know.