Sam Jones article about Spanish Beauty in THE OBSERVER
Sam Jones writes “Despite spending the summers of her youth in Fuengirola, watching the foreign tourists at play and devouring the English-language paperbacks she found in a little bookshop in the Andalucían town, nothing could prepare Esther García Llovet for the spectacular unreality of the place that inspired her noir novel Spanish Beauty.
“Benidorm is something of a myth in Spain – and a myth that no one goes to because there’s this stigma that Benidorm is the worst place in Spain,” says the writer.
But on a working visit to the famous Costa Blanca resort a few years ago, she fell in love with its skyscrapers, its peculiarities and even its sky, which, as she writes in the book, is “the colour of Fanta”.
“It’s not that it’s nothing like Spain; it’s that it’s not like anything else,” says García Llovet. “It looked to me like the future and it looked totally out of place – and that made it very attractive.”
Spanish Beauty, which was published in English last week and which is being developed as a film, follows Michela McKay, a cynical, vermouth-downing and dazzlingly corrupt Policía Nacional officer as she trawls Benidorm for her missing British father and for a Dunhill cigarette lighter that once belonged to the British gangster Reggie Kray.”