Red Water - Paperback

by Jurica Pavičic (Author), Matt Robinson (Translator)

A woman disappears after a beach party, and the search for her reveals Croatia's complex history well beyond the fall of Communism.

Called The Mediterranean Flower for its beauty, Split has a complex history that is perhaps best explored within a mystery. In 1989, beautiful Silva doesn't come home. Young cop Gorki Sain discovers that she isn't what she seemed--she dabbled in drugs and dealt in heroin. But Gorki soon finds himself out of a job as Yugoslavia plunges into a fratricidal war. Silva's brother stubbornly continues the search amid the upheavals of Croatian society, from the fall of communism through the 1991-1995 war. The former cop returns to solve the 30-year-old mystery in a different role, one less than ethically tied to toxic land speculation and corruption that comes with the tourist boom on the Dalmatian Coast.

"This finely engineered, haunting novel has been deservedly garlanded with awards." ---Financial Times

"A brilliant cocktail of mystery and recent history, compellingly told."--Kirkus

"The best crime fiction of 2025 so far: In this outstanding novel, Jurica Pavicic uses the unsolved disappearance of a teenage girl, Silva, to document the impact of the Yugoslav civil war." --Times/Sunday Times

Author Biography

Author Jurica Pavičic is a Croatian writer, scriptwriter, and journalist. Born in 1965 and living in Split, Croatia, he has written seven novels, two collections of short stories, and essays on film, Dalmatia, and the Mediterranean world. His work has been translated into five languages, but Red Water is his first novel to be translated into English.

Translator Matt Robinson, born in the UK in 1978, moved to Belgrade in 2000 and worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. He now lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, working as a freelance editor and literary translator. Red Water is the second novel he has translated.