Needle in a Hay Stack »

Ernesto Mallo: Born in 1948, Mallo is a published essayist, newspaper columnist, and playwright. He is a former militant, pursued by the dictatorship as a member of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, which was later absorbed by the Montoneros guerilla movement. Needle in a Haystack is his first novel and the first in a trilogy with detective Lascano. The first two are being made into films in Argentina.

Jethro Soutar: Jethro Soutar, born in Sheffield, lives in London and has recently published two works of non-fiction, 'Ronaldinho: Football's Flamboyant Maestro' and a part biography, part chronicle of a film movement, entitled 'Gael García Bernal and the Latin American New Wave', published in July 2008. This is his first translation of fiction

Argentina under the dictatorship. No one is innocent. A crime novel by a former member of the guerrilla movement

Publishers Weekly

As a member of a guerrilla movement that opposed Argentina's dictatorship, Mallo brings authenticity to his gripping debut, set in 1979 during military rule of that country. Early one morning, Superintendent Lascano of the Buenos Aires police looks into a report that two bodies have been dumped on a river bank. Instead, he finds three corpses--a young man and young woman, whose obliterated features are consistent with an army hit, and a man around 60, his face intact. The older victim turns out to be Holocaust survivor and money lender Elías Biterman, whose profession and faith provide no shortage of enemies. While Mallo reveals the killer's identity well before the end, the book's power derives from his depiction of an honest cop trying to do his job when even a judge observes, "With so many corpses everywhere, why worry about one more?" Martin Cruz Smith and Philip Kerr fans will be rewarded. (Sept.)