The Madrid Connection

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**.**