Patricia Melo – författare

The novel is set in the Pantanal, the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small 'plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack. After but a moment's hesitation he pockets the coke and the pilot's expensive watch. Thus begins the protagonist's long slide into corruption. When the crash site is located several days later, the pilot's body is missing and remains unfound for months despite a large-scale police search. Our hero gets involved in a busted cocaine deal and ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. The family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son. Our hero doesn't have the pilot's body so someone else's will do. Or so he thinks.

Maiquel is basically a decent person but has a short fuse. In one mad moment he loses his temper and kills someone - and gets away with it. Then unusual circumstances lead to another murder, this time for profit. This is the story of Maiquel's rise in social esteem, but fall into moral depravity.

For eleven-year-old Kingie, there are lessons to be learned from drug trafficking. His first job is as a lookout, working on the hillside slums of Rio de Janerio. But as he grows older he realises that in order to survive you must also keep a close watch on yourself as well. In her powerful new novel, Patricia Melo tells of Kingie's life of crime, of his poverty-ridden childhood, how he pursues his dreams and the way he learns to achieve leadership. In his uncertain world, chaos manifests itself as violence and deprivation, whether machine-gun fire, unwanted adolescent pregnancy, or the fraught relationships between servants and their employers. Kingie's path intersects with a network of stories of love, family, crime and power. The plot twists through a compelling tale where rapid-fire language and a sharp sense of humour combine to make this gripping story.

Maiquel is an ex-contract killer who's been a fugitive for ten years - ever since his girlfriend Erica ran off with his daughter, took up with an evangelical pastor and disappeared from his life. When his aunt dies, leaving him a house and a savings account, Maiquel has a fresh chance to find the lost world of his onetime family. Breaking all the rules in the book, including his own, he sets out on a relentless journey to seek revenge.

From best-selling Brazilian novelist Patrícia Melo comes a genre-defying tale of women in the Amazon and their reckoning with brutal oppression—by turns poetic, humorous, dark, and inspiring.The Simple Art of Killing a Woman vividly conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.To escape her newly aggressive lover, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about the rampant attacks on the region’s women, which have grown so commonplace that the cases quickly fill her large notebook. What she finds in the jungle is not only persistent racism, patriarchy, and deforestation, but a deep longing for answers to her enigmatic past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of Icamiabas, warrior women bent on vengeance—and gradually, she recovers the details of her own mother’s early death.The Simple Art of Killing a Woman resists categorization: it is a series of prose poems lamenting the real-life women murdered by so many men in Brazil; a personal search for history, truth, and belonging; and a modern, exacting, and sometimes fantastical take on very old problems that, despite our better selves, dog us the world over.

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing.To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.What she finds in the jungle is not only relentless oppression, but a deep longing for answers to an unsolved crime from her past. Through the ritual use of ayahuasca, she meets a chorus of warrior women on a path of revenge and recovers the painful details of her mother’s death. The Simple Art of Killing a Woman is a psychological trip with a twist. It’s about the strength of individuals in the face of overwhelming violence, the problem of femicide in Brazil, and the haunting of a cold case.