In the midst of their local festivities, the residents
of Getxo discover the corpse of young and beautiful Anari and, screaming desperately above her, a foreigner
whom she was supposed to run off with. The next day, in the bookstore belonging
to Sancho Bordaberri, alias
Samuel Esparta, two young boys want to use their savings to hire his services
as a private investigator. They want to prove that the foreigner whom everyone
wanted to lynch is actually innocent. Samuel will discover that many suitors
and family members saw Anari that dreadful night, and
the case will become complicated when his investigation comes into conflict
with that of the police captain of Franco’s régime. As if that was not enough,
he will stumble upon a persistent popular legend that he knew nothing about and
which says that the graves of coastal cemeteries are emptied through the bottom
and thus the corpses spilt out to sea, where lovers may meet again for all of
eternity.
The second installment of the series starring
bookstore owner and detective Samuel Esparta that Sólo un cuerpo más opened, El cementerio vacío
establishes Pinilla also as a great writer of
crime fiction.
Ramiro
Pinilla was born in Bilbao in 1923.
He won the Nadal Prize in 1960 and the National Prize of the Critics
in 1961 with the novel Las ciegas
hormigas (The Blind Ants), and
was a finalist to the Planeta Prize in 1971 with Seno (Breast). For almost three decades he voluntarily
distanced himself from the publishing industry. During that time, Pinilla
published his own works, such as En el
tiempo de los tallos verdes (In the
Age of Green Stems, 1969), Recuerda,
oh recuerda (Remember, Oh Remember,
1974), Primeras historias de la Guerra
interminable (The First Stories of the Never-ending War,
1977), La gran guerra de Doña Toda (The Great War of Mrs. Toda, 1978), Andanzas de Txiqui Baskardo (The Adventures
of Txiqui Baskardo, 1980), Quince
años (Fifteen Years, 1990), and Huesos (Bones, 1997). Pinilla returned to the publishing circuit with Verdes valles, Colinas rojas (Green Vallies, Red Hills), a trilogy
made up of the novels La tierra convulsa
(The Earth Trembles), Los cuerpos desnudos (Naked Bodies), and Las cenizas del hierro (Iron
Ashes) that won the Euskadi Prize 2005, the National Critics
Prize, and the National Prize for Narrative in 2006. That same year,
Pinilla published La higuera (The Fig Tree), a novel about the Civil
War, humiliation, and forgiveness that is currently being translated into
several languages.