Declan Burke reviews Spanish Beauty in The Irish Times

Esther García Llovet’s Spanish Beauty introduces Michela McKay, a Benidorm-based detective of flexible morality and glaring want of vocation (“Michela doesn’t like people who call the police”). This is perhaps unsurprisingly given that she’s the daughter of a Spanish flamenco dancer who abandoned her at a young age, and an English professor of modern history whose failed opus was and ambitious affair: “The Seven Crowns: a comparative study of Shakespeare’s regicide plays and the London underworld gangs of the fifties”.

These days, Michela is battling a Russian invasion of Benidorm, a city that inspires our cynical heroine to wax lyrical: “Benidorm. Cheap culture. Beach culture. People who speak three languages without ever studying, corner shops, Belgians, watered-down gin and tonics, gays. Second-hand Tom Clancy novels, swollen with damp, crunchy with sand, sand on your pillow, sand in your paella, in your G-string, in the shower, all-day fry-ups, all-day Thai massage, cicadas at night. Piles of vomit, pissing against walls and Tom Jones songs. Melanomas, cystitis, diarrhoea all round. Chlamydia. And the sea.”

The McGuffin here is Regie Kray’s cigarette lighter, which the Russians have and Michela, for what passes for sentimental reasons, wants. A bracing fever-dream pulsing to the rhythms of the rotting heart of the Costa Blanca, Spanish Beauty reads like Raymond Chandler purging himself in the depths of a gin hangover.