Nick Burns
Partners in Crime
I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me
By Juan Pablo Villalobos (Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn)
And Other Stories 288pp £14.45 order from our bookshop
Everyone loves a feel-good story about a successful family business. Unfortunately for Juan Pablo, the protagonist of I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, his cousin Lorenzo’s business ventures are not faring as well as they might. That much is clear when, invited to a meeting with Lorenzo’s associates, he finds his cousin tied up and then has to watch as his brains get splattered across the walls.
Juan Pablo, fair-haired scion of an upper-middle-class Mexican family, had been looking forward to focusing on his dissertation on humour in Latin American literature at university in Barcelona. Instead he plunges deep into the Catalan demimonde on a mission to woo his heiress classmate, infiltrate her powerful family and avoid suffering his cousin’s fate at the hands of his vengeful erstwhile associates.
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