Barcelona, 1890. In a subterranean workshop beneath the Gothic Quarter, an immortal clockmaker named Baltasar Morel builds sophisticated automatons from brass. His partner is Chloé Permanyer-twenty-nine, magnificent, lethal-a woman who hunts the predators society refuses to punish. Her method: seduction. Her weapon: a kiss laced with paralytic poison that leaves her victims dying hard and wanting, confronting their sins as their final conscious act.
Together with forty-seven automatons who are developing desires of their own, Chloé and Baltasar wage a campaign of exquisite vengeance against the untouchable men of Catalonia's elite: Cardinals who violate the confessional. Painters who destroy their models. Aristocrats whose wealth has made them believe they are beyond consequence.
But as the automatons evolve-demanding to experience flesh and questioning the boundary between mechanism and soul-the hunt becomes far more dangerous than revenge. When Barcelona's power brokers hire an alienist to track the killer they call La Venjadora, and the 1893 Liceu opera house bombing tears the city apart, Chloé must confront the possibility that consciousness itself-human or artificial-is the most volatile substance in existence.
THE MYSTERIES OF BARCELONA is a Grand Guignol theater fused with a philosophical thriller. Spanning from the anatomical salons of 1770s Paris to the gaslit labyrinth of fin-de-siècle Catalonia, this erotic gothic serial explores embodiment, artificial consciousness, theological rebellion, and the dangerous proposition that justice and desire spring from the same source.
For readers of Anne Rice's baroque sensuality, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's Barcelona atmosphere, and Michel Houellebecq's philosophical transgression. This novel contains explicit sexual content, graphic violence, and unapologetic exploration of the body as sacred territory.
