La Bestia, El italiano, and De ninguna parte head the top 3 most borrowed adult books in Madrid libraries in the fourth quarter of 2022.

At Publishnews we want to highlight the most borrowed adult books in the bookstores of the Community of Madrid in the fourth quarter of 2022. La Bestia by Carmen Mola; El italiano by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and De ninguna parte, by Julia Navarro heads the top 3 most borrowed books. Here we tell you a little more about the top 10 titles in Madrid libraries in the last months of 2022.

1. The Beast by Carmen Mola

The year is 1834 and Madrid, a small city that is trying to make its way beyond the walls that surround it suffers a terrible cholera epidemic. But the plague is not the only thing that terrifies its inhabitants: in the suburbs appear dismembered corpses of girls that nobody claims. All the rumors point to the Beast, a being that no one has seen but everyone fears.

When little Clara disappears, her sister Lucía, along with Donoso, a one-eyed policeman, and Diego, a journalist, start a frantic countdown to find the girl alive. On their way, they stumble upon Fray Braulio, a guerrilla monk, and a mysterious gold ring with two crossed maces that everyone covets and for which some are willing to kill.

2. The Italian by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

In 1942 and 1943, during World War II, Italian combat divers sank or damaged fourteen Allied ships in Gibraltar and Algeciras Bay. In this novel, inspired by real events, only some characters and situations are imaginary. Elena Arbués, a twenty-seven-year-old bookseller, finds one morning while strolling along the beach one of those divers, fainted between the sand and the water. When she comes to his rescue, the young woman ignores that this determination will change her life and that love will only be part of a dangerous adventure.

3. From Nowhere by Julia Navarro

Abir Nasr is a teenager who helplessly witnesses the murder of his family during an Israeli army mission in southern Lebanon. Faced with the corpses of his mother and little sister, he vows to hunt down the culprits for the rest of his life.

Night after night, the threat of Abir breaks into the sleep of Jacob Baudin, one of the soldiers who took part in the action while doing his compulsory military service, facing the dilemma of fighting against enemies he has not chosen. Jacob, the son of French parents, does not stop feeling like an emigrant in Israel and tries to reconcile himself with an identity given to him by his Jewish condition.

After the tragedy, Abir is taken in by relatives in Paris, where he feels trapped between two irreconcilable worlds, the asphyxiating family nucleus and the open society that offers him freedom, embodied by two young women: his cousin Noura, who rebels against the impositions of her father’s religious fundamentalism, and Marion, a beautiful and vitalist teenager, with whom he falls obsessively in love.

From Nowhere is a journey to the confines of the conscience of two men who are forced to live according to identities they have not chosen and from which it is difficult to escape, whose lives cross again years later in Brussels under the smoke of the bombs with which The Circle, an Islamist organization, sows terror in the heart of Europe.

4. Carmen Mola’s baby

It is the night of the end of the Chinese year, and the year of the pig begins. Chesca, in charge of the Case Analysis Brigade for a year, has a date with Ángel Zárate, but at the last minute, he stands her up. Even so, she goes out to have fun, meets a man, and spends the night with him. The next morning, three men surround her bed, waiting to join the feast. And a repulsive smell of pork permeates the room. After a whole day with no sign of her, the BAC companions begin to search for her partner. They count on an invaluable help: Elena Blanco, who even though she left the police force after the debacle that was the Purple Net case, cannot turn her back on a friend. They will soon realize that behind Chesca’s disappearance lie unspeakable secrets.

5. Carmen Mola’s gypsy girlfriend

«In Madrid little is killed,» his mentor in the police told the young sub-inspector Ángel Zárate; «but when it is killed, it has nothing to envy to any city in the world,» might add Inspector Elena Blanco, head of the Case Analysis Brigade, a department created to solve the most complicated and abject crimes.

Susana Macaya, with a gypsy father but raised as a paya, disappears after her bachelorette party. Her body is found two days later in Quinta de Vista Alegre in the Carabanchel district of Madrid. It could be just another murder, were it not for the fact that the victim had been tortured following an unusual and atrocious ritual and that her sister Lara had suffered the same fate seven years earlier, also on the eve of her wedding. Lara’s murderer has been serving time since then, so there are only two possibilities: either someone has imitated his methods to kill the younger sister or there is an innocent person in jail.

6. Mrs. March by Virginia Feito

George March’s latest novel is a great success, and no one is prouder of it than his devoted wife, Mrs. March, who leads an exquisitely ordered life on the Upper East Side. One ordinary morning, as she sets out to buy olive bread at her favorite bakery, the salesgirl hints that the protagonist of George’s new book seems to be inspired by her. This casual remark snatches from her the certainty of knowing everything about her husband – and herself. Thus begins a hallucinatory and hallucinatory journey that may unveil a murder and secrets buried for too long.

7. The Great Serpent by Pierre Lemaitre

Mathilde Perrin, a sixty-three-year-old widow seems to enjoy a peaceful retirement in her small house in Melun, about 40 kilometers from Paris, where she lives alone with her Dalmatian, Ludo. However, behind that image of an elegant woman, burdened by being overweight, hides a ruthless contract killer in the service of French intelligence. With her Magnum 44, Mathilde is infallible: perfectionist and meticulous, she executes her victims in cold blood and without blinking an eye. But lately, her bad temper, frequent forgetfulness, and a certain dose of gratuitous cruelty are leading her to make too many mistakes. In The Great Serpent, a fun and exquisite macabre game in the purest Tarantino style, Pierre Lemaitre displays his most caustic, brilliant, and merciless humor.

A brilliant combination of an ingenious and precise plot with a fast-paced pace, The Great Serpent is the first crime novel written by Pierre Lemaitre. A murder board of chained murders loaded with biting dialogues, shocking scenes, and large doses of caustic and stark humor.

8. Violeta by Isabel Allende

Violeta comes into the world one stormy day in 1920, the first child in a family of five boisterous siblings. From the very beginning, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the shock waves of the Great War are still being felt when the Spanish flu reaches the shores of her native South American country, almost at the exact moment of her birth.

Thanks to her father’s clairvoyance, the family will emerge unscathed from this crisis only to be faced with a new one, when the Great Depression upsets the elegant urban life Violeta has known until now. Her family will lose everything and will be forced to retreat to a wild and remote region of the country. There Violet will come of age and have her first suitor…

In a letter addressed to a person she loves above all others, Violeta recalls devastating love disappointments and passionate romances, moments of poverty and prosperity, terrible losses, and immense joys. Her life will be shaped by some of the great events of history: the struggle for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.

9. Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado

Antonia Scott is a very special woman. She has a gift that is at the same time a curse: extraordinary intelligence. Thanks to it she has saved dozens of lives, but she has also lost everything. Today, she is sheltering against the world in her almost empty apartment in Lavapiés, from which she has no intention of ever leaving again. There is nothing left out there that interests her in the least.

Inspector Jon Gutiérrez is accused of corruption and suspended from employment and salary. He is a good cop involved in a very ugly business, and he no longer has much to lose. So he accepts the proposal of a mysterious stranger: go find Antonia and get her out of her confinement, get her to go back to doing whatever it was she did before, and the stranger will help him clear his name. A strange but seemingly easy assignment.

But Jon will soon realize that nothing is easy with Antonia.

10. Roma soy yo by Santiago Posteguillo

Rome, 77 B.C. The cruel senator Dolabela is going to be tried for corruption, but he has hired the best lawyers, he has bought the jury and, in addition, he is known for using violence against all those who oppose him. No one dares to be the prosecutor, until suddenly, against all odds, a young patrician only twenty-three years old agree to take the prosecution, defend the people of Rome and challenge the power of the elites. The name of the unknown lawyer is Gaius Julius Caesar. Masterfully combining an exhaustive historical rigor and an extraordinary narrative capacity, Santiago Posteguillo manages to immerse the reader in the heat of the battles, to make him walk through the most dangerous streets while the senators’ hired killers lurk in any corner, to live the great love story of Julius Caesar with Cornelia, his first wife, and to understand, in short, how were the origins of the man behind the myth.