Pascual March, as he now goes by, has been living off the grid in a backwater village outside of Barcelona, Spain since hanging up his espionage hat some 20 years ago. Everything is just fine until he gets a late night visit by a pair of threatening folks who not only take over his computer and phone, but summon him out onto his own terrace. Lina and Felix won't tell Pascual much more than to say that they need his skills for a job and they make it crystal clear that his family will suffer if he does not comply.
Pascual is not one to give in easily, but he can't put his family at risk, even though his common-law wife, Sara, is living in Granada while working on her latest album recording and his son, Rafael, is away at school. It seems Lina and Felix, or at least the mystery group they work for, need Pascual to do a serious amount of money laundering, to the tune of 22 billion dollars, and they need him to go to various locales and open bank accounts. Oh, and they need him to steal a pristine identity in order to do this - his own - that of Pascual Rose, not seen for 20+ years. It's the perfect plan and they will pay him a million bucks to do it. Somehow, he doesn't think it will be that easy.
He has no choice but to act as if he is going along with the plan, but meanwhile, he connects with a trusted friend named Dris, who will act as his man on the ground, facilitating phone calls to Sara and Raf with burner phones and such, since Lina and Felix have his phone under constant surveillance. He also enlists the very expensive help of a computer whiz named Salera to find out just who these people are and what he is up against.
As he is trying to play things cool, he is contacted by a woman named Artemisa who claims that her recently deceased father died mysteriously doing the exact same thing they are asking of Pascual. She wants revenge and to bring them down and he can help. It sounds noble enough, but mainly Pascual just wants to live through this experience, and he doesn't think that is Lina and Felix's end game for him.
To complicate matters, Pascual Rose is wanted as an accessory to murder in Germany, among other places, so he definitely doesn't want to pop up on the wrong radar. What's worse, a group of Russian gangsters want a piece of the pie too. It's going to be tough to please everybody and still survive.
Pascual globe-hops under the watchful eyes of his handlers, setting up the accounts in Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, Tangier and other exotic locations, but he, Dris, Salera and Artemisa are working their own angle. Will Pascual live to enjoy his payoff, or even just the rest of his life? Time will tell.
I can imagine that fans of the Pascual Rose character from reading previous books would be thrilled to dive back into another adventure set in modern times. For me, the book was interesting, but it didn't grip me like some books do. I felt a bit alienated by the fact that Pascual and most everyone he talks to uses Spanish phrases regularly and I don't speak Spanish. I can't stand it when a book requires me to look up words of a different language, and in this case, I just figured out essentially what they were saying by context, but I found it annoying. Also, the character of Pascual Rose was a philanderer and I found it difficult to be sympathetic towards him. He is checking out many of the women he comes into contact with, sleeping with some, yet to others he claims to be a happily married man. When he calls Sara, he tells her how much he loves her and that she is his life. Huh?
Overall, I didn't love it, and while his adventure certainly takes him around the world and on some dangerous trips, it just wasn't my favorite book and main character. Your mileage may vary.
