Blood on the saddle - Rafael Reig

Dickens & Clot Investigations Ltd, a detective agency in a waterlogged, semi-buried Madrid of the near future, has a couple of unusual specialities: helping distraught authors and taking on Manex Chopeitia. The authors are frantically in search of characters who?ve quit the page and assumed a life of their own; Manex Chopeitia is the legendary Big Brother of the genetic-engineering company that rules over both the capital and the destiny of the US-Iberian Federation.
Carlos Clot ? a paunchy, sartorially inept and alcoholic private eye ? cycles, boats and gumshoes his way around a drug- and drink-sodden metropolis. With the help of a cowboy sidekick, on the loose from an unfinished manuscript, Carlos is on a personal quest to put some dodgy people (both ?real? and ?fictional?) in their place.

Born in Asturias in 1963, Rafael Reig studied Philosophy and Humanities in Madrid and later in New York, where he wrote his PhD thesis on 19th-century literary depictions of the prostitute. Today Reig combines university teaching with his writing and editing activities. His latest novel is Guapa de cara ('A Pretty Face'), published in 2004. Blood on the Saddle is the first of his novels to be translated into English.

Hilarious, a literary Hellzapoppin'
Matt Thorne

Clever, funny and very readable - Reig's genre-hopping novel underlines the importance of reading as an act of pleasure rather than duty
and Westerns?
Sa?l FERN?NDEZ - Ben Richards ?The melancholic private-eye Carlos Clot is the new Spanish anti-hero... one of the funniest and most provocative novels of recent years. A crazy novel... short and very sweet?
Rosa Mora, El Pa?s
?Blood on the Saddle is a delirious surpris