No One in This Land | The Time of the Beasts | Good Intentions
A contract killer with no public identity connects the lives of police officers, journalists, mobsters and victims in a saga where organized crime contaminates everything it touches. In the Nameless Hitman Trilogy, the past is never truly gone, secrets always resurface, and every decision pushes the characters toward an inevitable fate. A noir trilogy by bestselling author Víctor del Árbol.
In the Nameless Hitman Saga, by international bestselling author Víctor del Árbol, one of the leading voices in European crime fiction, readers enter a universe ruled by organized crime and violence. At its center stands a contract killer with no public identity, the axis of a choral narrative in which police officers, journalists, mobsters, collateral victims and individuals scarred by irreparable loss converge.
Throughout the trilogy, criminal assignments, investigations, disappearances and settling of scores unfold across different settings and time periods, weaving a complex web of relationships where everything is connected and every character carries secrets, trauma and guilt that gradually surface as the story progresses.
In No One in This Land, Inspector Julián Leal loses his job in Barcelona after brutally assaulting a businessman he believes to be a pedophile. Shortly afterward, he receives a terminal diagnosis that leaves him with little time to live.
With nothing left to lose, he returns to the Galician village he fled thirty years earlier, haunted by his father’s unsolved murder and a shattered childhood. His arrival coincides with a series of crimes that make him the prime suspect.
Isolated even from his closest friend and colleague, Agent Virginia, Leal launches a desperate investigation to prove his innocence. In parallel, we hear the voice of the real killer: a hitman who applies his own sense of justice and closely follows the inspector’s every move.
Cornered by the police and by his illness, Leal confronts his past and his own victimhood in a final act of heroism—saving a child as a form of redemption, fully aware that it may become his ultimate sentence.
In The Time of the Beasts, the focus shifts to the hitman, hiding on a Venezuelan islet until betrayal exposes his whereabouts to his former boss, Mexican drug lord El Oso Dávila. By threatening his sister and nephew, Dávila forces him to accept a new mission: travel to Lanzarote to kill Vesna, a young Bosnian hacker, and retrieve a flash drive containing highly compromising information. But he is not the only assassin after her, and the presence of a second hitman triggers a deadly chain of events that jeopardizes the mission.
As the plot unfolds, links emerge between the killings and a horrific episode from the Balkan War, when a group of wealthy men paid to shoot civilians in Sarajevo. Across Venezuela, Italy, the United States and Mexico, the protagonist encounters figures from his past while trying to protect his family and understand what kind of beast he has become.
In Good Intentions, forced by criminal magnate Orestes to carry out three assassinations in exchange for his definitive freedom, the hitman is drawn into a plot that explodes when his partner, journalist Clara Fité, flees with a notebook containing the keys to a vast cryptocurrency fortune.
At the same time, Clara reopens the investigation into the disappearance of the Vera siblings in the 1990s—a case tied to a town marked by real estate speculation, political and ecclesiastical corruption, drug trafficking and long-standing pacts of silence.
As the investigation advances, the true responsibilities of a local family, a construction tycoon and high-ranking Church officials in the accidental deaths of the children—and the subsequent cover-up that led to an innocent man’s conviction—come to light.
The storylines of the hitman, the journalist and the former witnesses converge in a finale where hidden truths are revealed, debts are settled, and it becomes clear that in a world built on lies and ambition, even good intentions can be used to justify evil.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Víctor del Árbol is a Spanish author recognized as one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Spanish-language crime fiction. Since his debut, he has published more than ten bestselling novels translated into multiple languages and widely acclaimed with international and national awards, including the Premio Tiflos de Novela (2006), the Prix du Polar Européen – Le Point (2012) for The Sadness of the Samurai, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (2015) for A Million Drops, the Premio Nadal de Novela (2016) for The Eve of Almost Everything, the Valencia Negra Award (2018) and the BlacklLadolid Award (2021). He has also been a finalist for the Fernando Lara Prize and received numerous recognitions at international crime fiction festivals.
The Nameless Hitman Trilogy is a powerful contemporary neo-noir that captivates from its opening pages with a gripping and emotionally charged plot. Del Árbol masterfully blends crime thriller elements with universal moral dilemmas embodied by a faceless contract killer and deeply human, broken characters such as Inspector Julián Leal and the complex female figures of Virginia and Clara. The narrative alternates timelines and perspectives, building an unrelenting mosaic. The result is a renewed form of noir rooted in intimate and social conflicts that resonate strongly today. All three novels are easily relocatable and possess enormous audiovisual potential thanks to their pace, dramatic arcs and balanced mix of action, suspense and emotion.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: En desarrollo.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish, French, Italian.
