Hello! Today I’m very pleased to welcome you to JuliaPalooza for my stop on the Blog Tour for The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories by Teresa Solana and translated by Peter Bush, which was published by Bitter Lemon Press earlier this month and is available to buy via the links below.
About the book
Ingenious, always witty and sometimes gruesome short stories by one of Spain’s best-known crime writers.
An impressive and very funny collection of stories by Teresa Solana but the fun is very dark indeed. The oddest things happen. Statues decompose and stink out galleries, two old grandmothers are vengeful killers, a prehistoric detective on the verge of becoming the first religious charlatan trails a triple murder that is threatening cave life as the early innocents knew it.
The collection also includes a sparkling web of Barcelona stories–connected by two criminal acts–that allows Solana to explore the darker side of different parts of the city and their seedier inhabitants.
Goodreads | Amazon UK | Amazon US
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories is an eccentric, funny and clever collection of twisted, off-the-wall short stories, covering a range of ghoulish dealings and seedy crimes. I must admit that I don’t think I had read any Catalan or Spanish fiction before but this was the perfect place to start!
The first section of Teresa Solana‘s collection is entitled Blood, Guts and Love and contains five quirky tales including the titular Serial Killer and each has an unusual or surprising narrator. I don’t want to say more because of spoilers but each story has a unique voice and an amusing and/or satisfying twist in the tale.
My favourites from this section were The First Prehistoric Serial Killer, The Son-in-Law and Still Life No. 41. The last one in particular was huge fun.
The second section, entitled Connections, is a series of stories which are interlinked in minor or major ways and the humorous style continues here, with an undercurrent of greed, selfishness and definitely of karma!
Connections is very cleverly constructed and my favourite stories here were The Second Mrs Appleton, Mansion with Sea Views, I Detest Mozart and But There Was Another Solution.
Each story across the whole book showcases some unique characters: some are appealing and sympathetic, some are very wrong but for the right reasons and some are simply bad to the bone.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories and I will definitely look out for more from Teresa Solana. Thank you to Bitter Lemon Press for my copy of the book and to Anne Cater for my spot on the Blog Tour.
If you enjoyed my review, please consider liking and/or sharing and, of course, buying the book: Goodreads | Amazon UK | Amazon US
About the author
Born in Barcelona in 1962, Teresa Solana lives in Oxford. She has written several highly acclaimed novels. A Not So Perfect Crime, the first in the Borja and Eduard crime series, won the 2006 Brigada 21 Prize for the best Catalan crime novel. Since then, she has published five more novels. Author of many articles and essays about translation Teresa Solana has also written children’s books.
About the Blog Tour
Please check out the rest of the bloggers on the tour for The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and other stories:
juliapalooza.com 
thanks for this Blog Tour support Julia x
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