Manel Loureiro's Impossible Assassination: Kill Every EU President on a Galician Island
One question before we begin: what does a novel need to make its premise feel not like a dinner-party idea but like something that makes you put it down and check whether the world is still where you left it?
With Antes de que todo cambie (Planeta, May 2026), Manel Loureiro raises the stakes considerably. Every president of the European Union gathered on La Toja — the privileged Galician island where thermal spa hotels meet Atlantic granite — and a plot to kill them all simultaneously. Not one. All of them. At once. The audacity of the premise is not just numerical. Loureiro turned it into actual research: he consulted security professionals who protect European leaders and discovered something unsettling — that "absolute security doesn't exist." That is what connects the best thrillers to the best science fiction: they don't invent the fear, they document it.
The protagonists are Samuel "Sam" Hoyos — a disgraced former Spanish intelligence (CNI) agent, the kind of character who in any Bourne film would be drinking whisky in a Lisbon apartment — and Julia "Jules" Duarte, an active counterterrorism operative. The classic genre duo, yes, but in Loureiro's hands that classicism is intentional, not lazy. He knows the conventions of the political thriller because he has spent years playing with them: the Apocalipsis Z trilogy (which began with El principio del fin and continued through Los días oscuros) made him one of the most internationally successful Spanish authors — two hundred thousand copies sold in the United States alone, translated into twenty languages.
But the question of the political thriller is always the same: how much does the real political context matter? Loureiro sets his multiple assassination plot at a moment when the European Union has spent years being perceived as a project in permanent crisis, threatened from within and without. The impossible attack on all its leaders is not just a narrative device: it is also a metaphor for the fragility of what we believe is protected.
A thriller that works as a convex mirror. That exaggerates so we can see more clearly. That places twenty-six presidents in danger on a spa island and asks, with elegant narrative violence: what now?
