Expat Life and Corruption in Spain: A Mystery of Art, Betrayal, and Survival

In the dry heat of Lanzarote’s volcanic plains, where winds carry secrets between ancient stone walls, A Matter of Latitude charts a slow-burning mystery rooted in loyalty, fear, and the quiet resilience of those living on the margins. The story orbits two deeply personal journeys—one of survival, the other of desperate search—as it reveals how fragile trust can be when truth threatens power.

At its heart is a collision—not just the one that nearly kills Celestino, but the emotional wreckage that follows. Celestino, a local artist and activist, vanishes into an abandoned fishing village after what he knows was no accident. Left behind is Paula, his English expat wife, whose life begins to tilt under the weight of uncertainty. She’s not new to solitude, but this absence is different. It’s laced with threat. The silence around her is no longer peaceful—it’s loaded.

For Paula, navigating expat life on a small island had already required adaptation: a delicate dance between insider and outsider, between observation and engagement. But when her husband disappears, that ambiguity takes on new meaning. Surrounded by neighbors like Shirley Mobad—charmingly invasive and erratically helpful—Paula finds her instincts tested. What begins as a quest for answers becomes a reckoning with the forces lurking beneath the surface of a tourist’s paradise: corruption, complicity, and a power structure built to silence dissent.

The novel’s emotional gravity lies in the quiet unraveling of Paula’s assumptions. Each of Celestino’s missing paintings, turning up in places of bureaucratic authority, casts doubt on what she knows—and what she thinks she knows. Is he protesting? Hiding? Or dead? The absence becomes more than personal. It echoes the broader themes of voice and visibility in systems designed to obscure.

Meanwhile, Celestino’s isolation paints a grim portrait of survival. His wounds and dwindling resources contrast sharply with the sunlit island around him—a landscape both beautiful and brutal. The feral dog stalking him mirrors the unseen forces closing in. But it is perhaps the persistence of both characters that defines the novel’s emotional undertow: not hope, exactly, but a quiet, stubborn refusal to let go.

By the end, what emerges is not a triumphant resolution, but a fragile reassembly of lives altered by betrayal and grief. There’s a win, yes—but it’s tempered by loss and the knowledge that safety, like justice, is rarely permanent. A Matter of Latitude becomes not just a mystery, but a meditation on the thin lines between exile and home, protest and peril, love and survival.