Hache Pueyo's (But Not Too Bold, Cabaret in Flames) first full-length novel, Tyrant in the Cracks, is a dark fantasy of time rifts and what ifs, where two characters must face who they might have been--only to find themselves bound to each other by fate.

In a tropical island country brimming with magic, cracks appear in any surface, visible only to those with a natural and trained talent for the occult. Professor Cícero Dangeris—ascetic, beautiful, disciplined—is among the very few, and together with his quiet assistant Eco, he embarks on a journey to track said fissures and study their secrets.

The cracks show echoes to another timeline, one in which the brutal military dictatorship that oppressed the island never ended. There, a puppet general commands the nation, controlled by another version of Dangeris—debauched, excessive, hedonistic—who is obsessed with finding an elusive mirror of a girl he sees through fissures since he was a child.

As they travel the island through an underwater train, new realities appear, proving how easy it is for people and countries to change. What Dangeris finds in those images are his own secrets, from the past he tries to hide to the desires he would rather repress, and there’s only one common denominator between all his parallel lives: Eco herself.