There Are No Happy Loves by Sergio Olguín, translated from Spanish by Miranda France: United Kingdom: Bitter Lemon Press; (c) 2022; ISBN 9781913-394714; 382 pages; $15.95.
SAN DIEGO – Argentine mystery writer Sergio Olguín has conjured a hard-hitting Jewish investigative journalist Verónica Rosenthal as his protagonist in a mystery that begins with a traffic accident victim’s missing wife and child and eventuates into an investigation into illegal adoptions and sales of human body parts.
Veronica’s investigation is into illegal adoptions; her ex-lover Federico’s is into the sale of body parts. Federico is a prosecutor working for the government, but before his break-up with Verónica, he had worked at her father’s prestigious and politically well-connected law firm. Even though they now work separately, never communicating with each other, their investigations end up focusing on the same suspects both in the Argentine government and in a Catholic diocese.
As the title of the book suggests, the author is quite concerned with the impact of Federico’s and Veronica’s estrangement. He pursues their ways of compensating for the loss of each other as carefully as he does the developments in the two mystery cases. That is to say, readers of this mystery novel follow each half of the estranged couple through a series of separate-but-unsatisfying trysts, hook-ups, affairs, and would-be romances that Federico and Verónica conduct without admitting to themselves they really hunger for each other.
For Verónica, ferreting out the truth of any story she covers is never a matter for compromise. A true paragon of investigative journalism, she will not soft-pedal, no matter how powerful the subjects of her investigations may be nor how much danger she creates in the process for herself, her family, friends and publication.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World