Juegos de maldad / Evil Games

The first instalment of the crime series set in Barcelona with Judge Sofia Valle and her team. Along with her other routine proceedings, Judge Sofía Valle is focusing on these two cases: the stabbed boy Roger, barely fourteen years old, whose story contradicts itself, leading Corporal Anna Milà and Judge Sofía to further investigate his family environment; and the anti-drug operation that the Barcelona police force have made a priority.

At eleven o’clock on a rainy Thursday at the end of January Sofia Valle, examining magistrate, receives a call from Corporal Anna Milà of the Mossos d’Esquadra. A woman walking her dog in a housing estate on the outskirts of Taulera, thirty kilometres from Barcelona, has found a boy with a knife wound in his neck in a forest path. He was bleeding, he was numb with cold and he could barely speak, but shortly before the ambulance arrived he had whispered some confusing words: “Stars,” “She cut me,” and “She.” It is the culmination of a day that for Sofia has not been easy. She has had to deal in the court with the man who, for a long time, has been misleading the National Police of Barcelona and the court of Taulera, where she works. Marcos de Sola moves the strings of an increasingly influential drug gang from the comfort of his cell in jail and no one can prove it. He knows it and takes the liberty of threatening the judge in a veiled way. For twenty-two days Sofía Valle will have on her desk, besides all the routine proceedings, these two priority cases.