Summer’s here and if you’re young, fun and into banging tunes then the isle of Ibiza, “the White Island”, in the Spanish Balearic Islands, may be the holiday destination for you. From sleepy Mediterranean island to sixties sun kissed hippie hangout to the rave and nightclub capital of Europe. It’s not all clubbing though, Ibiza is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But still, tons of young people, all-night raves, summer sun…. you can count on Europe’s drug dealers, suntanning criminals, and a few rogue oligarch yacht dwellers to show up too to add to the fun and summer mayhem… So, crime fiction and Ibiza….
Cantabria-born but now Ibiza-based author/lawyer Francisco Marin has written a noir, The Demichellis Case (2022), a thriller set in the streets and courthouses of Ibiza. Eduardo Ribas is tried and convicted for killing a nurse (Ana López Demichellis). Ribas’s lawyers hire an eccentric private detective to try to unravel the truth. The Demichellis Case is a complex thriller with great descriptions of Ibiza Town’s central districts. The Spanish version El Caso Demichellis became the best-selling book on Amazon Spain and Italy during the summer of 2018.
German author Katja Piel’s Death on Ibiza (2016 and originally Tod auf Ibiza) contains many of the elements you might expect from an Ibiza-set thriller. Nick, a personal trainer to the wealthy spends the summer on Ibiza – it’s hard to wander round Ibiza and not meet a personal trainer! But after a wild night of partying, he wakes up with a sharp headache, no memory, and in his client’s villa, wearing a blood-soaked shirt. Perhaps getting close with a local drug lord’s son wasn’t such a great idea. Nick must retrace his steps to prove his innocence or his guilt.
Ibiza is part of Spain so, of course, the Great British Costa del Crime makes an appearance (thanks to the lack of an extradition treaty between Spain and the UK due to the unresolved argument over the sovereignty of Gibraltar a number of wanted British criminals sit out their lives on the Costas beyond the reach of UK law). Neil Forsyth’s San Carlos (2014) is set in 1989. The UK Witness Protection Scheme pays you £180.75 a week – not much. Ibiza offers an escape – sun, sangria and some old mates. Then you meet a woman with a story and along comes your past. For those that loved the movie Sexy Beast.
Perhaps the Costa del Crime has lost out a bit in recent decades to the tales of the Russian oligarchs and criminals hitting the Spanish Costas and Ibiza with far more money…and guns. Lance Charnes’s Engano (2021) is one of the author’s series of DeWitt Agency mysteries. Disgraced ex-cop Carson is working off the huge loans her father failed to pay back to a Russian mafia godfather. So when the mobster asks her to find and return Viktoriya Baranova, the wayward daughter of a Russian cabinet minister, Carson doesn’t get to say “no.” And so Carson plunges into the lifestyles of the rich and idle from the megaclubs of Ibiza to the vineyards of Barcelona. Of course, since the start of the Ukraine War the number of Russian-owned mega yachts in Ibiza’s harbours has shrunk considerably, but the outsize influence of Russian money on the island can still be felt.
Nick Oldham’s Ambush (2017) is a high-octane race through Ibiza. Former Royal Marine, ex-cop and sportfishing skipper Steve Flynn is spending an idyllic summer running pleasure cruises for holidaymakers on the island of Ibiza. But then he stumbles across a botched armed robbery in progress and can’t help but get involved. The crew he interferes with though will want revenge and Steve’s the hunted man now.
And a cozy – Dorothy Dunnett’s Ibiza Surprise (2023) is the third book in the “Dolly” series that revolves around Johnson Johnson, a mysterious portrait painter who always seems to show up on his yacht, Dolly. This time around Sarah Cassells, a young British woman who has just completed her training as a chef, hears of her father’s violent death on Ibiza. She refuses to believe it’s suicide. Enter stage left an art dealer; two beautiful jetsetters; an American woman who is not all what she seems, and then Johnson Johnson on Dolly.
RB Schalin’s The Ibiza Connection (2014) finds Jonas Axberg, an expat living happily on the island of Ibiza. One day an old friend asks him to look into the disappearance of his daughter who had come down to work during the summer. But as begins to look for her Jonas realizes there is more to her disappearance than what he thought and maybe she had become involved with the island’s local criminal fraternity.
And finally, some non-fiction that explains Ibiza. Stephen Armstrong’s The White Island (2005) runs from a Carthaginian sex cult, Roman centurions in R&R through to the 60s druggies and the 90 ravers. As the publisher’s blurb says “This is the history of Ibiza, the fantasy island, framed by one long, golden summer where anything can happen – and it usually does.” And an Ibiza-riddled true crime memoir – Damien Enright’s Dope in the Age of Innocence (2010). It’s Ibiza, in 1960 the resorts and nightclubs still a long way off. Damien Enright, twenty-one-years old and Irish, arrives on the island with his wife and two children and finds a handful of down-at-heel foreign Bohemians leading wild, hedonistic lives. But their lives soon spiral down into divorce, LSD, travellers check scams, hashish dealing and going on the run. The Swinging 60s could turn bad in Ibiza in the wrong company.
