• Publisher: Beletrina
• 344 pages
• Author: Irena Svetek
• Original title: Rdeča kapica

It’s winter in Ljubljana and the snow is starting to fall. A man walking his dog in a park on the outskirts of town discovers the body of a brutally mur- dered thirteen-year-old girl, dressed only in a red cape. The criminal inves- tigation that follows leads to a tiny town in the south of Serbia where a young woman was cruelly murdered many years ago. The son who witnessed his mother’s murder was, aged four, adopted and taken to Slovenia. District state prosecutor Mio Aurelli is convinced the two events are linked but it is only when he receives an old diary from an orthodox priest that the story begins to slowly fall into place.

Little Red Riding Hood reveals the dark and perverted lay- ers of human nature and also holds up a mirror to society, reflecting the long-term consequences of educational neglect and abuse of children. It is the first book in Irena Svetek’s psychological crime series featuring protagonist Mio Aurelli – district state prosecutor and gambling addict.

About the author

Irena Svetek

Irena Svetek (1975) holds a doctorate from the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts. Her first novel Close Up (Od blizu) won her the 2004 Best Debut Award of the Slovenian Book Fair and a nomination for the Kresnik Award for best novel

of the year. She is also author of the novels Seventh Wave (Sedmi val, 2011) and Go to Sleep, My Child, Go to Sleep (Zaspi, mala moja, zaspi, 2014). In recent years she has been mostly scriptwriting and has written the screenplays for numerous films, TV series and programmes. In 2021 she published the first in her series of psychological crime novels Little Red Riding Hood (Rdeča kapica). The novel became a best-seller and is being made into a TV series. White Wolf is the second novel of the series and a TV adaptation is also forthcoming.