“A Woman in the Dark”…a crime and suspense in the Brazilian way

The novel “A Woman in the Dark” by Brazilian writer Rafael Moniz was published by Dar Al-Arabi in Cairo, translated by Rania Al-Rabat. The work belongs to crime and suspense literature; Where the author surprises the readers with a lightning start that embodies a heinous crime that claimed the lives of an entire family, a father, a mother and a son, but for an incomprehensible reason the four-year-old daughter is not killed like the rest of the family, but rather the killer leaves her with her little bear “Abu” who accompanies her throughout her life. Then the events jump to the future after twenty years to see what happened to this child now, and how her psychiatrist is trying to get her out of this violent crisis and the nervous shock that befell her, and left deep scars like old wounds on her soul.
Here the question becomes urgent: Will the girl be able to confront the murderer of her family, who was not satisfied with killing only; Rather, he sprayed the faces of the victims with a black liquid, especially since he returns to manipulate them and tries to destroy them psychologically, as he previously destroyed her family virtually? Surprisingly, the heroine does not retreat into her shell of fears or seek to escape from the past; Rather, she deals as if a war was imposed on her, and she decides to confront the ghosts of the past and do the impossible to reveal the identity of the killer.
It is noteworthy that Rafael Muniz is a Brazilian writer and lawyer, born in 1990 in Rio de Janeiro, and has published many collections of short stories, mystery and crime stories. When he was twenty years old, he dazzled critics and the general readership with his well-known novel, “The Suicides,” an Arabic translation of which was published in 2021 under the title “Russian Roulette.” Moniz was nominated for many literary awards, and won many of them, such as the “Benvia” literary award, and the “Machado” award awarded by the National Library of Brazil, and the “Sao Paulo” award. At the age of twenty-four, he published his best-selling novel “Wonderful Days”, which immediately gained wide fame and an encouraging critical reception, which was translated by Dar Al-Arabi in 2019 under the title “A Woman in a Bag”.