Thanks to the publishers and NetGaalley for the ARC in return for a review.
Not really sure what i made of this book.
It's extremely short and I finished it in less than ninety minutes one evening, it's subject matter certainly won't be to everyones liking, it all happened in a matter of hours one morning but despite all of that I think i quite enjoyed it. It's not every day that you suffer a blowout on the motorway and when you go to change the tyre you find a dead man handcuffed in your boot.
Plenty of drugs, violence, sex and swearing.
If that's your scene then this one is for you, otherwise probably best to give it a miss.

Not a good book. Having found it distasteful throughout I stuggled to reach the end only to find there was no logical conclusion to the story. It was as if the author had taken a break and could not be bothered to pick up the storyline from where he left off.

Luis Machi, sometime businessman, is having a very bad day. He has found a corpse in the boot of his car, and it seems he is being set up for the murder, which escalates into a tale of ever-rising stakes as he battles against time to figure out who has tried to frame him, and why... all while trying to work out what to do with the body.

This review will be fairly brief as I really struggled with this book, to be honest, and despite it being relatively short, I gave up at the halfway mark, as I think I gave it a good attempt, but it just wasn’t for me. This book has been translated from the original language, which wouldn’t normally be in itself an issue, but I found the translation very obvious and clunky. I’m not sure if it’s due to the translation or not - so either the translator has stuck rigidly to the original text and it just didn’t translate well, or they have adapted it and re-interpreted themselves, but either way, I just found it quite difficult to settle into. I also found the violence to be quite overblown in parts - I’m no stranger to violence in books, crime and horror are my favourite genres, but I think this just added to my distaste for this book.


I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Tough talking, gritty sex scenes and sadistic and humiliating gesture are the hallmarks of the ‘hero’ Marchi of this satiric novel - the author also doesn’t like him and the predicament just gets worse - a dead body in the back of his slick fancy car ... the ending is delicious and darkly humourous. I suspect this noir is not for everyone but it’s a classic take on the genre ... expertly done almost with bitterness and anger itself.

Every agent acts for an end.

This is the premise of the book; The Order of Things : The Realism of the principal of fidelity by French Dominican theologian Reginald Garriogou Le Grange.

Mr. Machi doesn't believe in such nonsense. For doing so would mean that he isn't the one who is in control of his own free will. For an existentialist has to be in control of everything. Screw everyone else.

The book gets tossed out the window of the 200k BMW with it's custom made seats and a dashboard that Mr. Machi uses to put his cocaine on while flying like a'bolt of lightning." Wearing his 300 dollar Versace shirt. One of his imported 300 silk ties will controlling all that he surveys at the El Imperio restaurant where he bribes government officials, judges, and anyone else. Cheating on his wife and berating anyone.

A blowout occurs on his 200 k BMW and after Mr. Machi can not believe that the young kid on the other line of the phone doesn't know who he is, goes to the trunk and finds a dead body with its face blown away and handcuffed to the seat with fuzzy pink handcuffs.

His free will just became inhibited as he will spend the rest of the night trying like hell to get into control.

The author does an incredible job of giving the reader a backstory of Mr. Machi's life as well as the other characters in the story.

That ending.
What hilarity as every agent works for an end.

Mr. Machi has a problem. Someone deliberately caused his BMW to have a flat tire. When he opened the trunk to find the spare, he instead found a dead body. His instinct is to get rid of the body, but it is attached to the trunk’s hinge with the fur-covered handcuffs he keeps for encounters with his mistress.

Getting rid of the body is a challenge, even in Buenos Aires, where dead bodies are not uncommon. But as he gathers the tools he needs to detach the corpse from his trunk, Mr. Machi is preoccupied with thoughts of how the body — of someone he doesn’t recognize — ended up in his car. He doesn’t think he has many enemies, certainly none who would go such extravagant lengths to cause such a serious problem. And how many of them could know about the fur-covered handcuffs?

Much of Like Flies from Afar consists of Mr. Machi scrutinizing memories of the people he has angered or alienated. His wife. His gay son. His daughter’s boyfriend. His bodyguard. Various women. People who have an interest in the Buenos Aires club he owns. The employees he fired after years of loyal service for missing a shift. Although he won’t admit it to himself or doesn’t care, it seems unlikely that anyone actually likes Mr. Machi, because he acts with a callous disregard for the people he doesn’t actively despise. Mr. Machi thinks of himself as an innocent victim, but the reader recognizes that his shallow lack of self-awareness is a barrier that shields him from self-reproach.

Like Flies from Afar is a dark comedy. Mr. Machi’s cluelessness furnishes the humor. The story, in fact, builds to a surprising punchline. Readers might be disappointed that there is no satisfying resolution of the mystery — its continuation is left to the reader’s imagination — but the ending is a satisfying, and almost karmic, non-resolution of the simple plot.

RECOMMENDED

Maybe it’s the translation where some of the fine points are missed but nevertheless the book is intriguing to say the least. Containing plenty of black humour, if it was meant to be humour, but enjoyed. The ending was a surprise but not if you thought about it really.

K Ferrari's Argentinian Noir has been shortlisted for the CWA crime fiction in translation dagger, it drips with the blackest of humour as it takes in a day of the life of the odious excuse for a human being that is Luis Machi, a self made man with an inflated sense of his own importance. Laughably, he refers to himself as a successful businessman, with the delusion that he has no enemies, only rivals, competitors, employees and partners, and in his eyes, he is a good man. He is untroubled by principles, morals or ethics, is contemptuous of almost everyone, without an iota of humanity in him. After a session of cocaine fuelled sex, he gets into his exclusive and expensive BMW with every intention of driving home to the El Barrio, a gated community. His life is derailed when he discovers a corpse in the trunk, with a shredded face, dressed in a blue suit, chained by pink fur handcuffs, reminiscent of those used by him in his sex games.

He descends into a paranoid nightmare, not once showing any curiosity about the identity of the dead man, it is all about him as he dredges his guilty personal history for who is likely to be responsible for targeting him. It is a past that reveals him to be anti-semitic, a die hard racist, a misogynist, complicit in the crimes of torture and murder by the military junta and its secret police as he pointed his finger at 'communist scum' and troublemakers trying to fight for workers rights in his factory, all of whom 'disappeared'. As times changed, he developed a 'complex' system of favours that ensures that very little changes for him, with other opportunities to make money and to profit from misery, continuing his draconian ways of running his establishment, El Emporio. Machi considers an extremely long list of candidates that might be seeking revenge and retribution, including 'The Cesspit', his sadistic, torturing and murdering Chief of Security, his nagging wife, Mita, whom he has never been faithful to, his daughter, Luciana, his estranged son, Alan, along with many others, like flies from afar.

This is a vibrant and compulsive satire, a picture of Argentina, past and present, its military dictatorship and after, as portrayed through the life and behaviour of the rotten to the core Luis Machi, a micro example that helps to partly explain the country's dark past and how it is people, men like Machi, that prop up human rights abusing regimes. I found this to be an utterly engaging read, but it is not for everyone, there is much profanity, and the brutality is not for the faint of heart. Many thanks to Black Thorn and Canongate for an ARC.

Buenois Aires Argentina - Luisito Machi inherited a factory from his father. He exploited his workers, cut corners, encouraged the Mob and successfully sold the business and now owns a high class restaurant and bar.
He treat everybody with contempt, particularly his wife Mirta who's family owns a successful cattle ranch and are Old money and look down on Machi's achievements. His daughter Luciana he indulges but hates the man she lives with.
He drinks to excess, smokes expensive cigars and goes with Whores and doesn't hide this from his wife. Then one day his world tilts. He finds a dead man hancuffed to the boot of his top of the range BMW. The handcuffs are ones he uses in his sex games and the dead man has had his face blown off with Machi's pistol.
He knows he has to somehow get rid of the corpse - but can he?
I've not read anything by this author before. He comes across as a colourful character. The book is quite short but interesting. I would recommend and will look to read more from this author.

Like Flies From Afar is black Argentinian crime fiction. Translated by Adrian West it is a descent into the life of a crime boss, desperately trying to work out who is trying to get to him. Shortlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, it is a short, pacey, drug fuelled fever dream of violence and entitlement.
Luis Machi is very comfortably at the top of his criminal empire. He has all the trappings of wealth his rotating rota of mistresses, a constant supply of drugs and an ever suffering wife waiting at home. But something is rotten. On his way home after a big night he gets a flat tyre and on opening the boot to get the space he finds a body with its face obliterated. And so begins Machi’s paranoid odyssey as he tries to dispose of the body while also trying to work out who might have betrayed him.
The structure of the book allows for the delivery of an episodic, non-linear history of Mahci’s rise to power, peopled with those not much better than him and those who were just crushed along the way. Being Argentina, Machi was given his start by the corrupt military, taking over a clothes making factory and randomly denouncing some of the workers. From there he moved up to running a nightclub and a range of other criminal enterprises including fight-fixing. At each point along the way, another person emerges who could have an axe to grind with Machi.
Despite its shifting narrative point of view and non-linear structure, Like Flies from Afar is fairly one note with a fairly simple plot. But it is also not very long, at just over 200 pages, it is a relatively brief decent into Machi’s violent world to explore the radiating impact of a powerful, amoral personality. For all that, readers who are happy to stick with this form of ultra-violent narrative are likely to very quickly find themselves quietly cheering on Machi’s anonymous tormentor.

A day in the life of an immoral indulgent tycoon, self-satisfied with every desire at his disposal, lackeys to serve without question, and workers exploited and grovelling at his command in his thriving business. After being indulged one morning he sets off in his BMW and bursts a tyre and when he opens the boot to find the spare, finds a body handcuffed inside. There after follows the tale of how he is full of terror in planning how to deal with it and the worries of who could be the enemy that did it, when and how was it done. Over the day he gradually manages to dispose of the body and any possible incriminating evidence to his satisfaction and finllynreturns home euphoric with his achievement to celebrate and to clean himself up for the evening. Taking even more and more lines to enhance his jubilation, he meets his nemesis. Not a pleasant character to spend time with.

Like Flies from Afar by K Ferrari is a staccato violent novel based on a single day in the life of Mr Machi. If that sounds like it should be a gritty page turner then you may be disappointed.

Machi discovers a body in the boot of his car and spends the day pondering who planted it and why while endeavouring to dispose of the body. The plot is interspersed with incidents from Machi’s violent rise to power and a catalogue of people who might have a grudge against him.

I found Like Flies from Afar to be tedious and pointless, I didn’t care what the end was going to be, only that it would come soon. Thankfully it is pretty short.

According to his publisher

“Ferrari works as a janitor for the Buenos Aires metro at the Pasteur-Amia station on line B. In the 1990s, he was deported from the United States, where he and his wife were trying to find work.”
This may appeal to some and has been heralded as a sensation by some critics, I’d recommend giving it a miss.

From Good Reads:
A very unpleasant and shady businessman finds a corpse in the boot of his car. Who is it, who put it there, who can help him get rid of it. Luis spends the rest of the day frantically trying to answer these questions - are his past deeds coming home to roost.
This book is as cocaine fueled as Luis - dark, mildly humourous, doesn't pull its punches, violence, lots of swearing.
Short, so an afternoon on the sofa affair - utter escapism to a world hopefully few will ever inhabit. I liked it.

I was grateful for this ARC, as it was a book I read quickly and enjoyed immensely. The pace and power of the writing matched the paranoia of the main character. It gripped from start to finish, though it may not be too everyone's taste.
The story is pinned tightly to a day in the main character's life, but what a day. Pointedly aimed at Argentinian politics, money and history, K Ferrari packs more into that day than most people do in a lifetime.
This is a gritty read, wickedly funny in places, and a sure-fire certainty for a film adaptation!
I recommend it highly!

This short story is not the type of book that I normally read and it is not a style that I like. Sorry.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.

This book is very short (mercifully), an interesting premise which could have worked well but..
From the outset there is detailed violence and sexual scenes which may put some people off. The language is profane and obscene. Virtually every sentence has an expletive. Set in Argentina an extremely wealthy man (Machi) finds a body in the boot of his car when he gets a flat tyre from some spiked tracks thrown in the road. What ensues as he tries to discover who is trying to set him up for murder is partly farcical, part black comedy and just part rubbish. It's trying really hard to be an Argentinian Pulp Fiction book and it just throws everything at it and hopes something works. Well it doesn't. There might be translation issues, I don't know, but this book is certainly not well written or constructed. It all feels a bit lazy and shallow. Machi is such a superficial character and the other characters are even less well developed. Very one dimensional. I am totally at a loss as to how this book got short listed for anything. The description of a 10/11 year olds breasts made me go cold. I had already gathered that Machi was an objectionable being. The other sex was perfunctory, the drug taking boring and the violence stereotypical and just done because- well yes why? Supposedly commenting on corruption and violence in Argentina this book could have been set anywhere. There is no real Argentinian feel.
Very disappointing- not sure who will want to read this apart from giving a stereotypical answer myself

A real short sharp shocker. Brutally violent from the outset. Ferrari really doesn't hold back on the lengths that people will go to to right a wrong. A book that's probably not for everyone but I must say I enjoyed it immensely.

Hideously and unnecessarily vulgar. Not at all for the faint of heart and most certainly not for me!