Snow in Mars

Between thriller and science fiction, Pablo Tébar describes a devastating future that is scarily close to home.

“Welcome to Mars.” This is the first thing León Miranda, an expert in dead languages, hears when he lands on the Red Planet, now in the process of colonisation. He had to leave his wife and son behind for a mysterious job about which he has not been given much information. Only upon arriving does he discover his task: he must translate a stone mural full of inscriptions in the language of an ancient civilisation, a stone mural that is suspected to contain the answer to an ancestral mystery.

Meanwhile, on the slowly dying Earth, the days are numbered. Human beings have squeezed resources to the point of exhaustion, and desertification and
pandemics are unstoppable. The planet has been divided into two zones by a miles-long fence. In the prosperous region in which the well-to-do people live, a serial killer known as the Undertaker enforces justice at his discretion. Given the lack of clues surrounding these events, the military police officer Lora Walters faces an investigation against the clock to unmask this elusive subject.

On the other side of the wall, in the area ravaged by natural disasters and to which the zombies (sick, delinquent people without resources) are banished, the drug trafficker Félix and the little orphan Nunu take advantage of the fact that a section of the wall has been knocked down. The evacuation to Mars is imminent, but only those who are in the prosperous region will get the authorisation to emigrate.