La niña de oro
Pablo Maurette

NOVEL | 2024 | 264 pages

Just before the winter holidays of the year 1999, biology professor Aníbal Doliner is found murdered inside his home in Buenos Aires. The crime thwarts prosecutor Silvia Rey’s vacation plans, as she’s forced to take care of the proceedings.

The clues all point to an albino taxi driver nicknamed Copito, who frequented the murdered man’s apartment. But when it seems like the case is about to be closed, things get complicated and she comes across another criminal proceeding involving an African wizard. As the investigation moves forward, everything becomes tangled, and it turns out that nothing is as it seemed at first.

The police investigation, with all its deductions and unexpected connections, strongly resembles a game that the prosecutor has played with her father ever since she was a young girl, consisting of collecting disconnected references to the same object. If there are two references, it’s called a “double.” Doubles are pretty common. If the reference appears three times, either as a word, an image, or in the flesh, then it’s a “triple.”

Doubles and triples, corpses and suspects, puzzles, and answers. How much of the satisfactory resolution of a police case is deductive logic and how much is pure luck?

Pablo Maurette has written a detective novel full of ingenuity with priceless characters—starting with the prosecutor and her father—that functions as a sophisticated mechanism of narrative precision.

RIGHTS: world spanish EDITORIAL ANAGRAMA

La niña de oro is a crime novel and high literature. Pablo Maurette is a master.
— Alvaro Enrigue
Everything seems to have a place in this novel: crime, mutilation, bibliofilia, black magic, and whimsical erudition, brought down to the innocent land of the crime novel by the depraved Renaissance man that is Maurette.
— Alan Pauls
La niña de oro, a magnificent novel with characters—some extravagant—that are created with depth and terse prose...A detective investigation, the prostitution of minors, magical thinking, pseudoscientific delirium, and police corruption are intertwined in the plot of an ingenious and unconventional plot developed with pulse and without implausible twists.
— Íñigo Urrutia, El Diario Vasco
La Niña de Oro is a detective novel that begins with a persecution that we won’t hear much about until later in the novel. It ends up being a passionate mystery with a good dose of humor, not only because of the detective plot but because of the dimension added by the psychological and human plane. The fantastical attempts are anchored by the human realities that permeate the story, in which there is also room for reflections on the decline of romantic relationships or the existence of God.
— Jaime Cedillo, El Cultural
The most original part of this novel is how it unravels the different endings. How it abandons the investigators in order to show us the truth that they will never know, and, in addition, a certain amorality of truth when it is imposed on compassion or ignorance. New ways of telling the same story.
— Carlos Zanón, La Vanguardia
Pablo Maurette is a very interesting novelist, because he perfectly masters the mechanisms of his craft as a professor of Comparative Literature. Reading La niña de oro can be a sort of murky fun—a kind of Buenos Aires The Name of the Rose with its chronology rooted in the winter holidays, or our summer.
— Jordi Corominas, El Mundo
Silvia Rey works at the Prosecutor’s Office where crimes are ‘more an embarrassment than a fear.’ She is 39, doesn’t mind being alone, and is a strong but easygoing person. Her vacation plans are thwarted by the murder of Aníbal Doliner, a peculiar Biology professor. The first suspect is a taxi boy—a young albino sex worker—but nothing is as simple as it seems. The proceedings progress slowly but at a good rate, mixing interrogations with the prosecutor’s conversations with her ancient father over breakfast that are filled with feeling and intelligent reflections. There’s also a healthy cast of secondary characters, like the pigeon-killing widow, who complete the narration very well. The police procedures are covered by the sub-inspector Carucci who is full of twists and turns. He is special because of his loneliness, his sweets, and his undefined attractiveness. The picture is completed by a vision of Buenos Aires in the late 90s that is immersed in violence, structural corruption, and hints of other cases that get in her way and move her farther away from the resolution...All of this is held up by sober prose that discusses violence without the fear of the explicit but without abuse—almost elegantly. And with an ending that is not at all complacent; a pure delight.
— Juan Carlos Galindo, El País
Crimes and investigations are written into the everyday. This is the fascinating thing about Maurette’s novel. (...) A lively story with precise descriptive details ensures a gratifying and pleasant reading experience.
— Santo Sanz Villanueva, El Cultural
We can’t refrain from highlighting the fluidness and quality of Maurette’s prose. His construction of characters is enviable, and his dialogues boast a simplicity that is not at all easy to achieve. With all of this, the writer, screenwriter, and professor from Argentina constructs a novel that is able to break from the mold of the classic crime novel with plenty of nods to the classic North American novel, which he twists and modernizes.
— Marta Marne, El Periódico
If one of the fundamentals of art according to Borges—chance, echoes, and resonances—dominates in this story, it is in literature as a game and nonsense, where we can find César Aria. (...) Like a good ‘depraved Renaissance man,’ as Alan Pauls describes this author, he exhibits a great capacity for changing registers, going from slang to classical quitations, and he plays with that border where jokes touch incorrectness.
— María Eugenia Villalonga, Perfil
La Niña de Oro is an agile, exciting, terrible book that revolves around the many meanings of the word ‘monster.’ What was Frankenstein’s monster? Perpetrator? Victim? That question applies to many of the characters and all of the professions...
— Márgara Averbach, La Nación
A magnificent novel.
— Martín Caparrós
The Golden Girl is a perfect crime novel, which also deals with classism, conspiracies and superstition.
— Cadena Ser