The latest addition to my website is Alberto Fuguet‘s Tinta roja [Red Ink]. Our hero is Alfonso Fernández Ferrer, who is fifty-one when writing this book but looks back at an experience in his early twenties. He had been studying journalism at university and he is sent for a four month internship at a Santiago (Chile) tabloid, where is sent to work on the police section, i.e. crimes and other violent deaths. His boss is Saúl Faúndez, a hardened journalist who likes drinking and women but has a gift for getting to the scene of the crime before the police and finding out what really happened. Alfonso learns a lot from him but we and he learn that there are a lot of bloody deaths in Santiago – murders, suicides and traffic accidents. Fuguet spares us no details as Alfonso gradually becomes immune till the crimes are not happening just to strangers but to those he knows. It is an interesting Bildungsroman but very bloody.