Fiction
The Light in Beijing
by Francisco José Viegas
A body hanging from the pillars of the D. Luís Bridge, in Porto, challenging a transforming, cosmopolite, and tourist-filled city. A woman’s cadaver abandoned in the hills of the Douro — evoking a series of crimes in the Porto underworld. What seem like two independent occurrences end up revealing connections that aren’t surprising for Detective Jaime Ramos — who is simultaneously facing his Communist past, an inquiry into his work in the Police force, a strange request from an old friend and a search for a missing person, which will take him from the streets of Porto, Minho and Douro all the way to Beijing. A dense novel in which Jaime Ramos, now in his ninth book, questions what it means to be Portuguese in a country dominated by complicit elites, endogamy and occult powers.
