The Body Snatcher

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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.

Reviews

Praise for The Body Snatcher: "An excellent and atypical book, a fantastic adventure."--Huffington Post Canada "An explosive mixture of dread, greed and corruption. You won't put it down until you've read the very last page."--Cosmopolitan Brazil Praise for Patricia Melo': 'Melo (The Killer and In Praise of Lies) is a promising literary crime novelist, one of a new crop of Brazilian suspense writers that includes Rubem Fonseca. Melo keeps the tale oscillating between morbid intrigue and hilarity, deftly skewering the publishing industry in the process' PW 'The jolts that this Brazilian thriller delivers (The Killer) come not from the repeated instances of gore but from Maiquel's recurrent longing for basic human needs--love, salvation, a spiffy pair of shoes.' New Yorker

Author Bio

Patricia Melo is an author and playwright born in Sao Paolo (1962) but now sharing her time between Brazil and in Switzerland. Her novels Lost World, The Killer, In Praise of Lies and Inferno have been published in English to rave reviews. In 1999, Time magazine included her among the fifty "Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium." Her works have also been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Dutch.