Tough guys don't dance

A detective novel, a story of survival in a world where loyalty is pure instinct. By Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

«I was born a mongrel, a cross between a Spanish mastiff and a Fila Brasileiro. As a puppy I had one of those tender, ridiculous names given to newborn pups, but too much time has passed since then. I've forgotten it. For a long time now, everyone calls me Negro.»

For days now, at Margot's Watering Hole, where the neighborhood mutts gather, nothing has been heard of Teo and Boris the Handsome. Their pals sense that something dark, sinister, is behind their disappearance, keeping them on alert. What happened can't be good; everyone suspects it, and their friend Negro knows it, a retired fighter with scars on his snout and in his memory. For him, it's a matter of instinct, of experience surviving the most difficult situations. That leads him to embark on a dangerous journey into the past, in search of his friends.

In this astonishing crime novel, amusing, tender, and gripping from beginning to end, Arturo Pérez-Reverte masterfully narrates the adventure of a dog in a world different from that of humans, where the best rules prevail—loyalty, intelligence, and camaraderie—and all political correctness or social convention is banished. A world in which there is sometimes clemency for the innocent. And justice for the guilty.

Critics have said about the author and his work:
«It must be his mastery in the use of language decorum, or a special understanding in what refers to the handling of different narrative registers, or whatever the hell it is [...], but when Arturo Pérez-Reverte entrenches himself behind a narrative project, he activates his interest and never leaves his readers indifferent.»
Pilar Castro, El Cultural

«Arturo Pérez-Reverte knows how to keep the reader hooked with every turn of the page.»
The New York Times Book Review

«Arturo Pérez-Reverte manages to keep the reader breathless.»
Corriere della Sera

«Readers won't be able to turn the page fast enough.»
Publishers Weekly

«There is a Spanish writer who resembles the best of Spielberg plus Umberto Eco. His name is Arturo Pérez-Reverte.»
La Repubblica

«His narrative wisdom, always so well constructed, so exhaustively detailed, documented and structured, to the point that, compared to all that, the real story seems weaker and sometimes even clichéd.»
Rafael Conte

«Arturo Pérez-Reverte makes us enjoy an intelligent game between history and fiction.»
The Times