The Light of Beijing

A body hanging from the pillars of the D. Luís Bridge in Porto, defying a transforming, cosmopolitan, and tourist-filled city. The corpse of a woman abandoned in the Douro hills – and the evocation of a series of crimes in Porto's nightlife underworld. What appear to be two independent occurrences ultimately reveal connections that do not surprise Inspector Jaime Ramos – who, at the same time, confronts his past as a communist militant, an internal inquiry into his actions in the police force, the strange request of an old friend, and the search for a disappeared character, which will lead him from the streets of Porto to Minho and Douro and, finally, to Beijing. A dense and twilight novel in which the figure of Jaime Ramos, now in his ninth book, questions the meaning of being Portuguese in a country dominated by complicit elites, endogamy, and hidden powers.