“Books: cheaper than plane tickets,” Lydia wrote on a board placed on the sidewalk in front of her bookstore to advertise books from exotic places to her customers. And she herself lived in a place, in Acapulco, which “shines with tourists, music, shops and the sea.” Until a chance encounter on the same day, combined with her drug cartel journalist husband’s investigation, revealed to her, in the most painful way, a truth she had not been aware of.

Like all interesting journeys, traveling through the pages of novels is associated with certain adventures. Even dangerous, given that a good writer seeks to look beyond the surface, that is, beyond the tourist clichés, revealing the less photogenic side of reality. If the novels are detective or spy novels, then the city in which the plot takes place is an important part of the work of art, and the traveler reader is pushed along with the characters into poorly lit streets where poverty and crime are maintained.

The challenge posed by Stephen King that anyone who reads the first ten pages of Janine Cummins’ novel A Foreign Land (Doma, trans.: Rigula Georgiadu) must read it is confirmed. Before the drug lords took control of the province of Guerrero – one of the last safe places in Mexico – Lydia and Sebastian lived under the illusion that they were invulnerable. Sandwiched between mountains and ocean, Acapulco breathed a protective bubble of tourism until the balance of crime was overturned. Tragic events ruined the lives of her and her eight-year-old son Luka, forcing them to flee. Their journey – by bus, train, foot – is fraught with danger, as it follows the path of immigrants trying to reach the US border. Thanks to the author’s careful documentary research, the plot is a modern journey through one of the most dangerous countries on the planet.

Author Carlos Tanon couldn’t think of a better person than a taxi driver to take us from one end to the other of his hometown, in his novel Taxi (published by Metaichmio, trans.: Daphne Christou). José or Sandino as everyone calls him because of his obsession with the Clash and their triple album “Sandinista!”, besides music, women, the night and great romances, he loves Barcelona. It is a place that surrounds his life but is outside the tourist guides, “a city is possible without Gaudí, the Gothic Quarter, Paseo de Gracia and Plan Cerda”, as he says.

This lonely man who knows John Updike, Cavafy, Springsteen well, suddenly finds himself involved in an illegal business, pursued by his gang and drug dealers, and tries to escape in the city, which gradually transforms into a narrative character.

Author Colson Whitehead was born, raised and lives in New York City. So he knows Harlem inside and out, which is why in his latest novel, “Turn in Harlem” (ed. Ikaros, trans.: Myrsini Gana), he refers to him as if in a love confession, written in the harsh language of detective fiction, but also a lot of self-deprecation . His creation, Ray Carney, is a character who personifies the moral dilemmas and contradictions of black Harlem in the 60s, an honest man and a family man who, when the time comes, easily acclimatizes in the underworld of his city. From the red carpet at the Walford Hotel and the famous “negroes of skill” – athletes, musicians, movie stars – to protest marches against the police killing of a young African American on 125th Street – Whitehead’s Harlem juggles masterfully between his two selves.

Apparently, the case is finally solved by the police Bekas, the popular hero of the novels of Yannis Maris. However, in “The Killer Was in a Tuxedo” (published by Agra), the image of “the most stubborn Athenian” is in the spotlight. A talented young operator, Angelides, witnesses a murder, and the tenacity of age haunts him until he unravels the tangled intrigue. The scenery of Marie’s 1950s Athens is exemplary and takes us to Athens, alive and sensual, where we drank beer in Flokas, spent our days in the company of mannequins at the Zonaras bar, took romantic walks in Glyfada and were under the control of the rich, but suspicious a good society holding illegal apartments for ambitious beauties on Hayden Street.

The only fixed point in Len Deighton’s spy novel The Secret Case of Hipcres (published by Keydarithmos, trans.: Antonis Kalokyris) is London. Everything else is a series of deceptions and duplicity, since we are in the 60s, at the height of the Cold War, when British intelligence is taken to find out why a high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. The atmosphere of the era – Soho, Piccadilly, Ridge, where bar patrons drink dry martinis, and girls wear translucent chiffon dresses – is so well conveyed that it resembles a movie. It is no coincidence that this 1962 blockbuster spy thriller was recently shown on the small screen by ITV.

The first novel in The Milo Trilogy by Olen Steinhauer is called The Tourist, and in it the author introduces us to his kind of “tourism” in the world of professional assassins, handpicked by the CIA, who carry out dangerous missions around the world. World. In the novel The Dangerous Exit (ed. Polis, trans.: Alcestis Trimeris), the “tourist” Milo Weaver, a very interesting hero who revives the classic spies of the genre, must again fight his doubts and at the same time avoid the invisible, dangerous threads laid his service from Budapest to Zurich, and from there to Berlin, Munich and New York.