Teresa Valero emphasizes the misery of Franco's regime in her new work "Contrapaso."

Madrid, February 1956. The crime reporters of the newspaper La Capital investigate the crimes of a serial killer who kills a woman every year. Veteran reporter Emilio Sanz is a former Falangist and critic of Franco's regime, and his young colleague, León Lenoir, carries with him a complex family life and his relationship with his cousin, the cartoonist Paloma Ríos. They come across another crime that exposes the corruption that was rampant during the dictatorship, here focused on the housing crisis and the machinations of power, which intersect with the world of cinema and the censorship that imprisoned it.

Under this premise, Teresa Valero (Madrid, 1969) returns with Contrapaso: mayores, con reparos (Norma), four years after leaving readers speechless by blending thriller with social criticism. The author was clear from the outset that she wanted the new book to be framed by cinema, because "on the one hand, it was propaganda and a tool of social control, with censorship and the weight of religion, but on the other, it also made people dream." And there's also glamour, of course, because this is the time when Spain is trying to leave behind its autarky and international isolation, with the arrival of the first US military bases, which also invest in multiple businesses, and several major film productions are being shot.

Read also "The wound is still open and the Franco families still have a lot of power," says the author.

If the first volume of the trilogy dealt with the tragedy of stolen children, here the underlying complaint is about institutional real estate corruption, exemplified by the real-life case in which Pilar Franco, the dictator's sister, acquired non-existent land for which she demanded substantial compensation: "She had a special talent for keeping certain properties," says Valero, who points out that "the wound is still open and the Francoist families still have a lot of power today." In the context of a major housing crisis, the author recalls in her book how many people arrived in the Spanish capital with almost nothing and often ended up living in substandard housing for which they had to pay, a fact also based on reality, as her father-in-law's father experienced a similar situation.

The situation of women is also one of the issues she addresses, with difficult episodes, some of which she found difficult to draw: “Sometimes I have a hard time, but I'm aware that it has to be done, you have to commit. Fiction, if you're honest and not frivolous, has value, and the empathy of the characters works.” “ Contrapaso isn't just a murder plot, because if it were, I'd get bored,” she notes, recalling that often “the secondary characters help define the other characters,” as in the case of Domi, which is a tribute “to the women who act as mothers to children who aren't theirs, the nannys.”

For the creator, her new book comes at a time when "many social rights are in question, if not in regression," with many young people asserting that they would not mind living under a dictatorship: "We are moved by emotional moments, but I would like my work to also serve as an education, because it is also an ode to understanding and reconciliation between people who think differently."