EDICIÓN ESPECIAL: PALABRAS ENVENENADAS

Maite Carranza had previously dealt with topics like sexual abuse or prostitution in her career as script writer. This triggered off her interest in writing a novel centred in these complex social matters but it was the cases of Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl in Austria that put her to work. Her motivation was to contribute to the denunciation that is arising from many voices that, until now, have been silenced by a society that prefers to shut its eyes concerning issues that consider taboo or shameful. “This is a novel that clearly breaks the age borders, grapping also the adult reader, asking for his attention”(El Periódico). The key is the structure of the novel, superbly assembled. Carranza has been inspired by the best crime fiction, building the plot as a mystery to be solved at the end, inviting the reader to put himself in the shoes of the characters in order to be able to find the clues that will lead to the answers. Poisoned words is the answer to the questions that everybody asked themselves after hearing about these cases. How is the every day life of a person locked? How is to get up without hope every day? How weak were they when they were kidnapped? Barbara is a teenager whose childhood was disturbed with violence, whose youth is a nightmare but she is very far away from understanding the abuse she’s suffered, she is confused with feelings of hate and love towards the offender, knowing that he is also the only one who keeps her bare connection to the world, he keeps her alive, after all. When life has been ripped of everything, the smallest human contact, no matter how terrible it can be, gets a value. The plot appears like a puzzle difficult to fit, made up of four different views of the case in first person: that of the police officer, the mother of the missing girl, the missing girls’ friend and the main character herself. Built using the structure of a crime fiction, it couldn’t be missing the character of the detective. In the novel, this role is played by the soon to get retired Inspector Lozano, who always refused to close the case, who took it almost as personal challenge. Gifted with a fine power of observation, completed with his experience and his capacity of empathy towards the weak, in this case the despondent mother, he gives us his account of the case with all the details and cold deductions put forward by the mind of a police officer but with the feelings of impotence in front of an unsolved case, especially frustrating for having had several suspects that went finally free. The mother’s lost inner dialogue made up of guilt, desperation and confusion, gives the most dramatic point to the novel. Devastated, hopeless but unable to stop blaming herself for her daughter’s fate, she lives in the desperate world of the living dead. The novel completes its mosaic with Barbara’s best friend, Eva, a key character in the development of events. Her turbulent relationship with her friend introduces us a different Barbara, a not so fragile teenager, a complex girl, a furious victim. The fast-paced inner conversations of these main characters take the reader into the plot, into an almost oppressive atmosphere, confused at the beginning but filled with subtle details that the reader will be gathering alongside the development of the plot, to get to the action-packed final pages. This is a novel that makes the reader to hold his breath from the beginning to the climax. Rights sold to Brazil, the Netherlands, Korea, Russia, France & Italia.