No-one loves a policeman

An ex-policeman with serious emotional baggage, Pablo Martelli leads an uneventful existence as a bathroom furniture salesman. Attempting to forget his former life as a member of Argentina's 'National Shame', he is haunted by the knowledge that his past has also cost him the love of his life. One night he is awoken by the sound of the telephone ringing and gets a call that changes his life.

Against the beleaguered backdrop of Argentina's social and political unrest and the downward economic spiral that paralysed the country in 2001, Martelli gets dragged back violently into his past. Amidst car chases and befriending a journalist, ex-policemen and a forensic scientist along the way, he is soon retracing his steps as a policeman on his quest to find out the killer of his good friend Edmundo Cárcano.

The beauty of Orsi's novel is that it operates on many levels. For No-one Loves a Policeman is not just a detective novel or a thriller, but rather a search for truth: not only to discover the circumstances surrounding Cárcano's death, but also the truth about his friend's life and even greater truths about his own.

For what Nick Caistor's translation occasionally lacks in register, he certainly makes up for in effectively rendering Orsi's muggy and frenzied Argentine landscape. Palpable in its oppressiveness, the backdrop itself transcends this novel above and beyond mere fiction to give a vivid depiction of Argentina's crisis years in the early 21st Century.