Review - The Butterfly House by Teresa Solana

The Butterfly House (Barcelona Nights, 2)

Teresa Solana (trans Peter Bush)
Corylus Books, 12 September 2026
Available as: e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781917586283

I'm grateful to Ewa for sending me an advance copy of The Butterfly House to consider for review and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

The Butterfly House is a detective novel, focussing on DI Norma Forester of the Barcelona police, following from Black Storms, the first in this series. Norma is not your traditional rundown, haunted detective marinading in drink, rather she's a happily married middle aged woman. Well, mostly happily married. As readers of the first book will now she has an occasional lover, David. It would be overstating things to say that in The Butterfly House she's feeling guilty, but she doesn't want Octavi, her husband, hurt. This subplot somewhat distracts both Norma and David in The Butterfly House, alongside the unease arising from it being their daughter, Violetta, and her lover Gerard who discover a dead body outside the Butterfly House itself...

I loved Norma and her family. This group, which forms the backdrop to much of the story, is diverse and raucous, we see grandmothers, aunts and stepchildren, many of them occupying the same capacious apartments (Norma is from a comfortably off family) and bickering genially throughout the book. There are darker currents, in particular the rebellious behaviour of Violetta and suspicion about Gerard  but nothing so dark as the gruesome murder.

I should mention that Octavi is the local chief medical examiner - and he's also got his hands full with So husband and wife and both busy in this book, their personal and professional lives and criss-crossing with guilt, pressure to solve the murder and sheer exhaustion building as the story climaxes. A theme the book shares with its predecessor is the importance of the police seeming to be effective in the eyes of politicians and press - rich that with Gerard and his fellow squatters firmly in the frame for the murder, any delay by Norma in arresting and charging him looks like favouritism.

Solana uses this book to highlight the underbelly of a bustling and well-known tourist city - the book is set during the downturn of the early 2000s, with many of the characters here hard-up, and others on the take or bending the rules just to get by. How far you can justify that is a recurring theme, one that Norma debates with her colleagues (just as she's rather defensive with her daughter, who despises the "Mossos", the police, who in turn make no bones about their disdain for the squatters and students who occupy some of Barcelona' crumbling mansions). We see desperate people, as well as those who have done well for themselves. It's not clear how Raquel, the murdered woman, fits in here.

I felt that Solana was really enjoying herself with this book as she threads back and to between the crime with its forensic evidence, red herrings and unexpected twists and the complex relationships in Norma's family, against a theme of compromise, deception and necessity. And I really enjoyed myself reading it. Norma is a strong central character - though possibly at times her instincts as a mother don't serve her well in navigating this maze - and someone I want to hear more about, so I hope that more book in the series follow in English. 

Peter Bush's translation serves the story well, giving it in perfectly clear English while maintaining the author's voice and the slight sense of "otherness' that comes from the story being set in a foreign country.

A book I'd recommend.

For more information about The Butterfly House, see the tour poster below, or the publisher's website here. 

You can buy The Butterfly House from Amazon.