El Esplendor / The Splendor
César and Rebeca are a couple of swindlers in their late twenties. He controls drugs and women in a luxury hotel in Madrid; she obtains data on the deceased without heirs and searches for relatives who can collect the inheritance in exchange for a commission.
Rebeca has just returned from a trip that promises huge profits but hides grave dangers on a remote island. The next morning César finds her in the living room and notices that her eyes are open, but she is unresponsive. Her body is twisted in an unimaginable position. The doctors discover some wounds on her body, and that she has had sexual relations. Other options ruled out, the diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder.
What has happened to her and who could have hurt her? César will start his own inquiry, fearing that his girlfriend has not told him the whole truth. César analyses the trip she made and, in doing so, realises that he knows even less than he thought: in Rebeca’s initial research into a couple in Vendrell, he discovers that they have only been in that place for three years and that they may have had a daughter on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. It is on that island that Rebeca has been on her last trip, just before the crisis. César does not want to lose Rebeca. Determined to find out what happened there, he travels to the island and tries to reconstruct the steps Rebeca took, who she got involved with, what could have happened to her. That investigation will bring him into contact with the world of luxury in Saint Peter Port, the economic centre of the island, and with Darcy, a lawyer who worked for the couple whose trail Rebeca was following. He reveals to César, that the elderly couple were in fact living in Spain under false identities. Their real names are Eduard Groizard and Mary Ann, owners of a huge company called Citadelle Trust Services, based on another Channel Island, Alderney. The key to everything that has happened may lie with Virginia Groizard, the daughter of the deceased couple, who lives in a remarkable fortress on Alderney, of the same name as her parents’ company: Citadelle.
El Esplendor is a mystery novel, a thriller that portrays identities, and alternates the points of view of César and Rebeca, with influences of Eyes Wide Shut or Millennium and certain influences from Dracula. The plot that will take us through such areas as the attempts to reach Virginia Groizard, an almost spectral character; the doubts of César, who does not know if Rebeca betrayed him with another man or if she had a really traumatic experience; the fortunes of the Groizard family and their true identity; the private parties held in their castle. And also the origins of Citadelle, the fortress the family inhabited in Alderney, which are linked with the island’s past and the years of the Nazi occupation when this place was known as Adolf Island and was a concentration camp.
Perhaps Rebecca and César thought they were so clever that they could take advantage of the situation and cash on it, but in reality they are the ones who have been trapped into something much bigger than they could have imagined. Citadelle is not just an old fortress.