Betty Boo

When a Buenos Aires industrialist is found dead at his home in La Maravillosa, an exclusive gated community, the novelist Nurit Iscar (nicknamed Betty Boo after Betty Boop) is contracted by a former lover, the editor of a national newspaper, to cover the story. Nurit teams up with the paper’s veteran, but now demoted, crime reporter. Soon they realize that they are falling in love, which complicates matters deliciously.

The murder is no random crime. Five members of the Argentine industrial and political elite, who all went to the same boarding-school, have died in apparently innocent circumstances. The Maravillosa murder is just the last in the series and those in power in Argentina are not about to allow all this brought to light. Too much is at stake.

Not for nothing is Claudia Pineiro Argentina’s most popular crime writer. Betty Boo is original, witty and hugely entertaining; it mixes murder with love, political power and journalism … Pineiro’s style-lengthy paragraphs containing a variety of thoughts, issues and dialogue with no quotation marks-is challenging at first, but is soon conquered, and is definitely worth the effort. It must have been hard to translate; Miranda France has done so excellently. Marcel Berlins, The Times