The Silent Pilgrims

On the road to Santiago, pilgrims walk in silence. Some of them never arrive. Northern Spain, 1880. Along the ancient Camino de Santiago, travellers are vanishing. A merchant leaves an inn at dawn and is never seen again. A young woman's name disappears from a monastery's guest book as if she had never existed. The villages shrug. The Church looks away. The Civil Guard has better things to do. Mateo Álvarez was once a magistrate, until he asked one question too many and lost his post. Now he walks the Camino alone, carrying his doubts rather than his faith. But he cannot ignore a pattern once he has seen it, and this one leads west, towards the great cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. With the help of Sister Isabel, a nun whose calm hides a sharp mind and a dangerous past, and Elena, who is searching for someone she refuses to name, Álvarez follows the trail through mountain passes, pilgrim hospitals, bandit country and the shadowed cloisters of the Church. The deeper he goes, the clearer it becomes that the disappearances are not random, and that the men behind them are powerful enough to erase a person from history itself. Rich in period detail and grounded in the real history of the Way of St James, The Silent Pilgrims is a classic detective mystery in the tradition of Boris Akunin and Arturo Pérez-Reverte: clever, atmospheric and full of the sights, sounds and legends of the most famous pilgrimage in Europe. For readers who love historical mysteries, and for anyone who has walked, or dreams of walking, the Camino.