Tim Parfitt – författare

A murder. A kidnapping. A lost Salvador Dalí painting. Just 36 hours to resolve all three.EVERY CRIME SCENE IS A WORK OF ART.Benjamin Blake is no ordinary detective ...Specialising in the criminal underworld of stolen and forged art, things don't always go the right way for Benjamin. But when they don't, he has a stubborn determination to put them right.Within hours of being sent to Barcelona to authenticate a possible Salvador Dalí painting, Benjamin is left stranded without his cell phone at a service station alongside a bloody corpse in the early hours of the morning, after being savagely attacked with his rental car stolen, together with the painting.Helped and hindered by the fiery Elena Carmona, pursued by a psychopathic hitman, Benjamin becomes the prime suspect in a politically motivated kidnap and murder. All this on the eve of Barcelona hosting a G20 summit and UN climate change conference, with the police in hot pursuit fearing a wider terrorist threat.From Nîmes in the South of France, across the border to the sweltering humidity of Girona, Barcelona, Figueres and Cadaqués, The Barcelona Connection is a fast-paced, gripping page-turner sprinkled with black comedy, blending the real with the surreal, art crime and mistaken identity … and where the clues at the crime scene might just be the mirror image of a long-lost work of art …

Of all the paintings in all the galleries in all of Madrid.They chose a Caravaggio.And they chose last night.On the night Madrid hosts the Champions League Final, disaster erupts at the Prado Museum: a guard is murdered and a Caravaggio is stolen.British art detective Benjamin Blake, hoping for a quiet few days in the city on a low-key assignment, instead finds himself dragged into the chaos he swore to avoid. Suddenly he's the investigation's uninvited headache – and possibly its key. Rival mafias begin circling. The Asians want him gone. The Italians want him alive – at least for now. As the cultural bureaucrats drag him into the case to deflect from their own failings, Madrid's homicide chief – choking on his own lies – wants him nowhere near the case, let alone the truth.Across the city, freelance journalist Elena Carmona is in Madrid on a separate assignment, digging into the poison of racism in football – an evil that opens into a far wider conspiracy. Trafficking, exploitation and revenge run beneath the pitch and deep into the criminal underworld, drawing her straight towards the same mafias now circling the stolen Caravaggio. As her investigation crashes straight into Benjamin's, they find themselves at the centre of something far darker than either imagined.Art, money, football, murder, mafia – Madrid was never going to keep them apart.The Madrid Connection is a fast, gripping and darkly funny page-turner - the brilliant sequel to The Barcelona Connection.