The Street of the Three Beds by Roser Caminals

The Street of the Three Beds. Roser Caminals. Barcelona E-Books. Sold by Amazon Digital Services, Inc. August 2012. 212 pages.  ASIN: B008OPDDVQ .

Maurici Aldabo is a playboy in the beginning of this novel.  His father is a manufacturer who hopes his son will eventually take over the business.  While Maurici does have talent in dealing with their European counterparts in business, he does only what he has to do and spends the rest of his time drinking and carousing with his friends and any ladies he can seduce.  The novel opens with his current dalliance, Rita, announcing that she is pregnant and the reader will be stunned by Maurici's callous yet nervous initial reaction. What a chump!

However, the situation becomes complex with Rita's disappearance and the pages that follow concern Maurici's transformation into a concerned, investigative, upstanding young man.  For this disappearance has shattered Maurici's safe cocoon world, and the results are dangerous but endearing as well as adventuresome.  

Maurici enters what he thinks is a world of prostitutes that perhaps Rita, a seamstress by trade, was secretly engaged in.  As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out that there is something far more sinister happening involving the lives of young woman who are being caught or trapped into a white slave trade business, overseen by the highest officials involved in government and business. Shocking? Not really yet the author deftly alerts the reader through each phase of discovery as to how shocking this is to the average citizen, represented obviously in Maurici Aldabo and perhaps those known all too well to him.

This was a good read with an okay ending.  Although there is much about the gothic style underworld of this story, the story could have just as well taken place in any other large city in any country.