El asesinato de Pitágoras by Marcos Chicot

In reality, in her new novel from the earlier trilogy she has only left a certain aftertaste of ghostly family secrets and the rural ambientation, though here it is a village in Galicia (the writer has Galician ancestors) and not the valley in Navarre. “I had to take a break, breathe and tell another story that I had had within me during a lot of time, six years, a novel about servitude to the bad the title is a proposition of greed, words of the devil in the gospels,” assures Redondo (San Sebastián, 1969), who a little more than one year ago finished Ofrenda a la tormenta, with which she closed a cycle begun in 2013. The runner-up was, to not be out of tune in a soiree that counted with the presence of the Spanish king and queen and some of the most important Spanish and Catalan politicians, for another phenomenon: Marcos Chicot, author of one of the most sold e-books in Spanish ( El asesinato de Pitágoras ), who, in recoil of his great success, again sets a plot that combines crime and historical novel in the classic Greece of the philosophers: the new title, El asesinato de Socrates (150,250 EUR in prize money). In Todo esto te daré, the novel with which she has won in Barcelona and pocketed the 601,000 EUR in prize money, Redondo doesn’t go on with the adventures of the trilogy’s policewoman from Navarra, but she keeps up the tone of a crime novel in which a famous writer discovers after an accident the double life of his partner. And all of this converges in a spectacular fashion in the writer Dolores Redondo, one of the latest great phenomena of Spanish publishing with her Baztán trilogy (more than 400,000 copies sold, published by Destino, label of Planeta group a tourist route already created a movie in the making…).

And further, as has been the norm during the last editions of the prize, it should go to somebody who belongs to us. The 65th edition of the Planeta Prize, a round number, required a flashy name, but also one the would fulfill the requirement of wide diffusion, and this is nowadays achieved by crime novels, the en vogue genre. Some excerpts from an excellent article by Carles Geli for El País:

El asesinato de Pitágoras by Marcos Chicot