Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
A retired journalist is murdered in Buenos Aires in what passes as a blundered robbery but his former colleagues smell a rat. There were hints that he had been working on a crucial investigation into corruption in high places and was about to reveal all to his closest friend. He was killed at the precise moment that she arrived at his house, crashing her car in an attempt to divert the killer, only to be shot herself.
Patricia is a powerful woman; an editor in an influential magazine, she recovers from her wounds and starts to assemble a posse of younger journalists to be led by Veronica Rosenthal (“Vero”, Olguin’s series protagonist). They are tasked to discover the real motivation for the murder and so to uncover the implied scandal, the details of which are said to be on a tablet that the victim had entrusted to his former wife.
She has gone to ground and the search for her opens Pandora’s box. A story that started ominously but coldly, promising an objective analysis of events, even of atrocities, with the advent of Vero plunges headlong into Grand Guignol. Assault is followed by abduction, blackmail by more murder; bloody action is compressed between deeply introverted explorations of Vero’s relationship with her partner, of his with his mistress, of the minutiae of his cooking, his attitude to fatherhood - with both his lovers becoming pregnant at the same time…. Domesticity, politics, graphic sex, all is stitched together against a sophisticated tapestry of newsroom, board room, lawyers’ chambers.
The plot of The Best Enemy is a convoluted crescendo collecting, as it blunders on, a man - war criminal or catspaw - who is building a new life in Argentina. Having said that this novel is basically a vehicle for Vero: an occasionally winsome woman who can be banged on the head, drugged, raped and still cheat death by spraying her abductor with skin moisturizer. From the infant who ran away from home to play with the boys on the street to the power figure who chooses career before babies, Vero is a post-modern survivor.
Editor’s Note Translated by Miranda France
