The Werewolf of Allariz
In 1852, Galician prosecutor Luciano Bastida Hernáez confronts Spain's first documented serial killer: Manuel Blanco Romasanta, a traveling merchant accused of murdering nine people?including three children?and rendering their bodies for soap. When Romasanta claims a mysterious curse transformed him into a wolf during the killings, Bastida must defeat both a supernatural defense and emerging psychiatric theories about "clinical lycanthropy."
Through meticulous investigation and brilliant prosecution, Bastida secures unanimous conviction on all counts and a death sentence. But his victory unravels when French physician Dr. Durand de Gros convinces Queen Isabella II that Romasanta suffers from genuine mental illness requiring medical study rather than execution. Royal clemency commutes the sentence to life imprisonment, denying justice to the victims' families and devastating the prosecutor who fought so hard for proportional punishment.
Over twenty-three years, Bastida grapples with the case's legacy: the fraudulent "medical study" that never occurred, the victims he memorialized but could not fully avenge, and the uncomfortable truth that perfect prosecution cannot guarantee just outcomes. His struggle transforms Spanish criminal law while teaching painful lessons about certainty, mercy, and the limits of legal power when confronting political forces and medical complexity.
A story of justice sought, imperfectly achieved, and reluctantly accepted.
