Los huérfanos / The Orphans

Following the overwhelming success of La novia gitana, Carmen Mola returns to shatter all the rules of the crime novel.

In Belfast, three children grew up in an orphanage where fear ruled and violence was the only way to survive. That hell turned them into brothers—and into something far more dangerous.

Years later, they are known as the Orphans. They rule a criminal empire that stretches from Ireland to the Costa del Sol, where luxury and brutality coexist openly. There, in Marbella, they have learned that power is not inherited—it is seized.

But in that same city, there is another family that also knows the price of power: the Pastors. For years they have lived in the shadow of a feared and respected patriarch, bound together by secrets, silences, and wounds that can never heal. And above them all, pulling the strings from the shadows, is Sister Mei, the woman before whom even the mafia bows its head.

When Trevor Strummer is accused of a murder in Madrid, District Attorney Laura Pastor faces the most important case of her career. What she doesn’t realize is that behind this crime lies a web of secrets connecting her own family to the Orphans.

Thus, caught between justice and revenge, between loyalty and blood, everyone will have to make a choice.

Because there are wounds that never heal.

And from them, monsters are born.