There are novels that feed on chilling real crimes and, by narrating them, bring them back to the table to show the horror the victims suffered. Cosamala (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978), goes a little further, because it transcends denunciation through recreation and transformation, thanks to prose of precise and unsettling beauty, about an episode of the Spanish Civil War experienced in Guillena, a municipality located about 20 km north of Seville. An episode that still shakes everyone who hears about it, both for its brutality and for the chronological proximity of the discovery.