White King is the final book in Juan Gómez-Jurado’s octane-fuelled Red Queen series (translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia). This is the book in which Gómez-Jurado takes his high concept crime thriller series and turns his premise up to eleven. It is more than a little bit bonkers, but those who have been on this ride since the first book will be well invested in the characters and keen to follow them down this particular rabbit hole. Given White King is the third book in a series there may be spoilers for earlier volumes.
White King opens seconds after the cliffhanger that ended the second book of the series Black Wolf. Red Queen Antonia Scott watches as her “shield” and friend Jon Gutiérrez is kidnapped off the street and immediately uses her unique mind to try and find a way to save him. But this is just the next move in a plan to upend Antonia’s world being driven by a mastermind who calls himself the White King. This plan includes killing other Red Queens around Europe but also sending Antonia on a frantic hunt to chase down clues that might reveal what is actually going on. At the same time, her handler Mentor is developing a good idea as to who might be involved in the campaign against Antonia but holds that information close to his chest as he is implicated.
In White King, Gómez-Jurado ties this trilogy up by bringing Antonia’s story full circle. Incidents from both of the previous books are recontextualised and subtle hints that have been dropped along the way have a bearing on this finale. Gómez-Jurado does so in a breathless fashion where every few pages seem to bring on a new ticking clock, cliffhanger or catastrophe.
At the centre of this all, through are the characters of Antonia and Jon. The pair represent yet another iteration of the classic Homes/Watson model – the savant investigator and their more intuitive and humanistic offsider. Their relationship has developed over the course of the series from antagonism to something resembling family. This change also charts a change in Antonia who starts to move past some of the more abusive programming that she went through to become the Red Queen.
White King is overall a fitting finale to a breathless thriller series. It is completely over the top, right down to the final showdown, but fans of this series will expect nothing less.
Just a postscript – this series is already being adapted for TV as Red Queen. The first series, based squarely on the first book, is available on Amazon with the second expected soon. The writing is cinematic enough to allow for a pretty seamless translation and the leads in particular capture the characters so well it is hard to read White King without picturing them.
White King by Juan Gómez-Jurado
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