Book excerpt: A professional translator and amateur detective travels to Barcelona to find a missing man in this mystery hailed as a “high-spirited comic adventure” (The New York Times). American but with an Irish passport, the itinerant translator Cassandra Reilly is living in London when she receives an unexpected phone call. The voice on the other end belongs to Frankie Stevens, a San Francisco transplant with an unusual request. Her husband, Ben, has gone missing—presumably in Barcelona—and Frankie needs a translator to help her find him. Not one to pass up a well-paying gig or a free trip to Barcelona, Cassandra takes the job. But she quickly realizes that all is not as it seems. Frankie’s charm is matched only by her guile. As Cassandra chases down leads in search of Ben, she becomes increasingly tangled in a web of half-truths—and caught between former flames Ana and Carmen. Winner of the British Crime Writers’ Award for Best Mystery Based in Europe and the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery, Gaudí Afternoon is the first book in the Cassandra Reilly Mystery series, which continues with Trouble in Transylvania and The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman, and concludes with The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists.