Spanish Lies
Description
On secondment to Spain, British detective, Michael Fernandez, encounters a part of his family he has never met and discovers he has inherited a house in Parcent, the village that shunned his father in 1951 when he was diagnosed with leprosy. That is why Michael hates Spain and has never set foot in his father's homeland.
Now he is offered a permanent job as a Captain in the Spanish Guardia Civil. Despite misgivings, he accepts and his first investigation thrusts him into the murky world of greedy developers and corrupt politicians eager to exploit the burgeoning property market in the Costa Blanca.
Unprepared for Spanish conventions, he becomes embroiled in a web of lies and deceit as he seeks to unravel the disappearance of a local boy and the murder of a local Mayor. Out of his depth and shocked at the extent of perversion and depravity he encounters, he is drawn into a mire of immorality that threatens to overwhelm his resolve.
Meanwhile, in Parcent, the tentacles of small village life engulf him in an irresistible intrigue and a mystery that has its roots in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.
More details
Person
Mark was born in Handforth, Cheshire and educated at Wilmslow Grammar School and Macclesfield College. In 2001, he left behind a thirty year career in local government in Manchester and South East London and moved to a small village inland from Spain's Northern Costa Blanca.
After adjusting to his "lifestyle transplant" he began writing and completed a humorous account of his early exploits entitled I Want to Live in Spain, published in 2004. A first novel, Missing, followed in 2006. His second novel, a murder mystery entitled Spanish Lies, is now published by Caffeine Nights.
Mark is a keen student of modern Spanish history from the Civil War and Franco's repressive regime to the present day. In 2005 he suffered the all-too-common misfortune of becoming involved in a property development scandal which threatened his new home, not to mention his financial well-being. Determined not become a victim of Spain's notorious "Land Grab" laws, Mark joined neighbours to fight the plans and stood as a candidate in local elections in 2007. A successful campaign saw the ruling political party ousted from the local town hall and the disastrous development plans were eventually annulled.
Spanish Lies is a fiendish murder mystery that draws heavily on Mark's knowledge of recent Spanish history and his experience of the ingrained culture of corruption that is still treated with phlegmatic indifference. The result is an intriguing thriller which, though grounded in fact, stretches credulity in terms of the depths of depravity and subversion to which some people will stoop in search of wealth and self-gratification. All this is balanced by an appreciation of the gentility of the Spanish way of life and the value placed by many ordinary Spaniards on family, friendship and humanity.
For the future Mark is researching a new novel set in 1940 in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War when Franco's tentative hold on power was reinforced with brutal oppression which saw thousands of innocent victims killed simply for supporting the wrong side. Many of those victims remain in unmarked graves, denied, even to this day, the decency of a Christian burial.
