The Foreign Girls

1. Veronica is a successful young Buenos Aires journalist, beautiful, unattached, with a healthy appetite for bourbon, married men and, on occasion, foreign women. She is a fascinating and complicated heroine, driven by a sense of justice but also by lust and ambition.

2. The second in a series of three by Olguín, following on from the acclaim for Fragility of Bodies. The Financial Times selected it as one of the three best thrillers of 2019. As before there are great characters, cliff-hangers, erotic scenes and humour adding plenty of thrills along the way.

3. The Foreign Girls is a gripping thriller that also shines a light on the phenomenon of femicide in Latin America, where the rape and the murder of women may be used as tools of intimidation or tactics between warring families or groups involved in drugs trafficking and corruption. The story was inspired by real events: the murder of two young French women in the same part of Argentina a few years back.

4. We always find a strong sensual element in Olguin’s novels, with a great focus in this one, refreshingly, on female satisfaction. In fact, there is a feminist dimension to his writing here with its social criticism of femicide and the abuse by the Church of vulnerable girls and young mothers. That said, there’s also a lot about big breasts and tight jeans. Olguín is good at combining eroticism with a ‘new man’ sensibility.

5. There is a long history of novels featuring investigating women journalists digging into crimes and The Foreign Girls fits right in. Think of Baltimore Blues, by Laura Lippman, where Tess Monaghan begins in a series of a dozen novels, and by the third in the series she’s a bona fide private investigator. Or Notorious by Allison Brennan, featuring the famous Maxine Revere. And of course Bitter Lemon’s very own Bettyboo by Claudia Piñeiro (like Olguin, an Argentine) with investigative journalist Nurit Iscar.