The Absent Ones of Valdelázaro

About this book

Lieutenant Casilda Ovejero hasn't slept a full night in twenty-six years, not since her brother Tomás walked out of their mountain village at seventeen and never came back. His face is painted on the family house in Valdelázaro, beside the faces of every neighbor who ever emigrated: the Absent Ones. Casilda left as soon as she could and returned only to bury her father. Then, one October morning, a young historian is found dead on the stone bench by the cross in the square, wrapped in the shawl of the Maiden of Souls, lantern and bell at her side, her face whitened with lime like one more portrait on the wall. She had been researching the emigrants of 1974. Four of them vanished without a trace. Casilda's captain sends her because she knows the village. But the village has spent half a century deciding who has left and who hasn't.