Water Rituals by Eva García Sáenz

(37. - 1176.) - Water Rituals by Eva García Sáenz translated by Nick Caistor - Another compelling opening for the second book in the White City trilogy. As with the first book, The Silence of the White City, Sáenz had me hooked early.

On the opening page Unai López de Ayala nicknamed Kraken, formerly a police inspector and now profiler, learns his lover is pregnant but she is unsure whether he or her deceased husband, a serial killer, is the father.

On the second page we learn he has partially recovered from being shot in the head. He has Broca’s aphasia which prevents him from speaking. He communicates through an “editing app on his cell phone”. He uses WhatsApp continually.

On the third page he is called to a crime scene where a young pregnant woman, her ankles tied together, has been found hanging from a tree branch with her head down in a “bronze cauldron” filled with water. The cauldron was made in Celtic times. She is dead from drowning.

On the fourth page he finds out the victim was a teenage love.

Such a complex murder raises questions of rituals, past and present.

The book shifts back and forth between Unai’s teenage years and the present.

For Unai and the 3 other boys in his cuadrilla the victim, Ana Belén Liaño, known as Annabel Lee, was their first love during a teenage summer they spent working on an archeological site.

She has made a successful career as a graphic novel artist and author.

His close colleague and friend, Estí, has been appointed inspector. She has controlled her drug addiction.

Unai conceals the personal relationships of himself and his cuadrilla from his supervisor and lover, Deputy SuperintendentAlba Diaz de Salvatierra.

And then there is another victim.

As he approaches the hanging body he genuflects “as a mark of respect” and recites his motto:

Here your hunt ends, and mine begins.

As inevitable, the murders become known and the public is terrified by another killer bound up in a personal ritual of death.

Unai has used a hacker known as Golden Girl to assist him with cases. She is extremely talented. She is also 69 years old and recovering from a hip operation. 

The story is bleak in many ways involving sexually abusive situations.

At the same time it is not only the men who are sexually manipulative.

The relationships within the cuadrilla and the police department are intense.

Amidst the tension there are moments of friendship. On Christmas Eve the members of Unai’s cuadrilla carry on the city and personal tradition of meeting to drink mulled wine, “the hot wine is infused with cinnamon, lemon, dried apricots, figs and other delights”.

Someone with a great knowledge of Celtic water rituals is exacting revenge and Unai is a target. The Celtic fertility ritual of Threefold Death where the victim is burned, hung and drowned is terrifying. If the victim is a pregnant woman she “has been judged a potentially unfit mother” and the unborn child is given to “las tres Matres, or the three mother goddess”.

The hunt for the killer is devilishly difficult as suspicion and paranoia creep into the minds of the investigators.

One of the investigator’s quirks is an obsessive use of Post-it notes. (I try not to use them at my office but I still find them very convenient.) She uses different coloured notes for different people. And she is pursuing a personal parallel related investigation.

The Water Rituals is a complicated book. Several plot lines are disturbing. There is significant but not excessive detail on death. What is most chilling is the macabre precision of the ritual taking of life. As with the first in the trilogy I was absorbed by the combination of history and personal relationships. I thought the translation flowed better in this book. Ultimately, at the heart of the book are thousands of years of history and the contemporary setting of the Basque region of Spain.

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Sáenz, Eva Garcia and translated by Nick Caistor - (2022) - The Silence of the White City and Broca's Aphasia in The Water Rituals