The Best Enemy

This is the fourth in Olguin’s Buenos Aires thriller series, starring the gutsy, earthy, yet vulnerable investigative reporter Veronica Rosenthal. Two journalists have been executed in cold blood. Is it a burglary gone wrong? Veronica has her doubts.

The magazine’s investigation of a high-level corruption scandal seems likelier to have triggered the violence. A scandal involving influential Argentine businessmen involved with an Israeli linked to atrocities committed in Gaza in 2014. This is a dazzling thriller but also a story about the possibilities of love, in which jealousy, eroticism, and humor make an appearance.

Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967 and was a journalist before turning to fiction. Olguín has won a number of awards, among others, the Premio Tusquets 2009 for his novel Oscura monótona sangre (＂Dark Monotonous Blood＂). His books have been translated into German, French and Italian. The Veronica Rosenthal series (The Best Enemy, There Are No Happy Loves, The Fragility of Bodies and The Foreign Girls) are his first novels to be translated into English.

The translator Miranda France is the author of two acclaimed volumes of travel writing: Don Quixote’s Delusions and Bad Times in Buenos Aires. She has also written Hill Farm and The Day Before the Fire and translated much Latin American fiction, including Claudia Piñeiro’s novels and all the Veronica Rosenthal series for Bitter Lemon Press.