A riveting debut noir novel that takes us from Brazil to Barcelona, with a millennial, political edge. Lucas Brodowski, a rookie cop from Rio de Janeiro, is sent to Barcelona in search of his family’s killer. But on arriving, he goes off the grid and decides to take matters into his own hands. He disguises himself as a chatarrero (scrap collector) and infiltrates an anarchical organization to gain intelligence on the whereabouts of El Catalan, the drug kingpin behind the murder of his mother, father, and adopted brother.  Before long Lucas finds himself in a strange love triangle with the organization’s leader, Laia Requena, and with Alba Partagas, the CEO of Azure Capital. Lucas, however, is unaware that Alba is the person Laia is working to bring down for her role in tenant evictions from bank-owned properties and a corruption scandal. By a strange twist of fate, shocking surprises eventually come to light in a tense confrontation in Lucas’s junk-filled loft. Marius Stankiewicz, a Toronto native, is a former international journalist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker who currently lives in Barcelona, where he works as a communications manager in the music and technology business. His journalistic work has been featured in NPR, Al Jazeera, Barcelona Metropolitan , the Toronto Star , the Globe and Mail , the Province , and Men’s Journal . Stankiewicz graduated with an MA in English from Jagiellonian University in Cracow and an MA in communication science & media from the University of Amsterdam. In his free time, he plays the drums, frequents dive bars, and trains in Muay Thai, an ancient combat sport originating in Thailand. 1  Voyeur  When the light came on across the street, the room’s dull glow, the color of blood plasma, seeped into the rainy night. Lightning bolt fissures ran across the greasy walls and empty bottles of wine were strewn about like an abandoned game of spin the bottle. A dirty mattress lay reared up into the corner. From his loft in the opposite building, Lucas Brodowski was sitting in his dark loft and wistfully looking out the window. After he took taking another sip of his wine, his eyes roved over the room a second time. He spotted a milk crate holding up a few melted candles, a floor lamp missing its lampshade, and a heavy metal band poster on the door, the band’s name in a font that looked like a careless stack of hedge trimmings. Lucas wore nothing but his underwear, and while he continued eating dinner, a man and woman suddenly burst into the room. He perked up and looked on as he knew one of them, the woman, whom he had spotted a few times drinking little pinch-cup coffees at a local cafetería, reading some book about vampires. She had long, black hair with one side of her head zero-guarded, revealing a tattoo that looked like an arrow married with a pagan symbol and some obscure, ancient hieroglyph. Other body art covered her skin like postage stamps on a package. A face full of dark makeup, piercings, and labret spikes, though Lucas couldn’t tell which hole metal was attached to or from which hole metal was protruding. Her light-colored eyes and morgue-white skin stood out, as did the shape she was endowed with. Esmeralda was her name, or Esme, for short, and she lived on the fifth floor in the building opposite—Lucas lived on the sixth, the ático—yet the broken blinds of Lucas’s ceiling-high windows were not always open like hers, which served to expose her raucous romps. The man who accompanied Esme into the room was slender yet muscular, with spiky hair and frosted tips. One could easily have mistaken him for the soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, wearing, as he was, a gold chain hanging down to his sternum and a diamond dangling from each earlobe. He was overtaken by uncontrollable lust mixed, it seemed, with the nervous agitation of a coke rush. While he impatiently removed his sneakers, unbuttoned his jeans and kicked them off, and tore off his shirt, Esme seemed more in command of herself. She gently flicked away her stiletto heels, disrobed calmly from her silk black gown and lingerie, and neatly folded and placed them next to her open chest of sex toys. Despite the erotic scene unfolding, and the nascent bulge appearing between his legs, hunger was a higher priority for Lucas, who had not eaten all day.