Don Manuel — The Benefit

A novel by Antonio Valverde

The Benefit

What if the ground beneath your feet were hiding a secret no one was ever meant to find?

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Chapter One

At La Almudena Cemetery, death is meant to be the final rest.

But for Don Manuel, waking up in the suffocating darkness of his own coffin is only the beginning of a reality he cannot begin to understand.

What if the end of a life isn't a twist of fate, but a sentence handed down from the shadows? Forced to become a ghost without a name to protect the people he loves, Don Manuel uncovers a clandestine underworld where the forgotten are quietly waiting for the moment to strike back.

While he watches the world from the exile of the resurrected, his granddaughter Raquel — a brilliant, sharp-tongued young lawyer — senses that the official story of his death is full of cracks no one wants to explain.

Raquel investigating

Raquel

«Every clue pulls her closer to the abyss.»

The Players

Every face is a piece of evidence.

Raquel

Unfinished proof

Raquel

The granddaughter who refuses to believe the official story.

Death was meant to be the final rest.

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The Object

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A suffocating, masterfully crafted thriller that lays bare the fragility of our society and the cold cruelty of those pulling the strings from behind glass walls.

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From the Novel

An Excerpt

“On a chessboard where everyone is deemed expendable, those who have nothing left to lose are gearing up to strike back.”

— The Benefit, Antonio Valverde

Antonio Valverde

Portrait

Antonio Valverde

The Author

Antonio Valverde

There are lives that follow a single path. Mine has preferred to travel many. Yet all of them have been bound by the same thread: an inexhaustible curiosity and an imagination that has never stopped asking questions.

From childhood I discovered that imagination could take me much further than any journey. While others gazed at a sky full of stars, I imagined the worlds that might lie hidden behind them. That fascination grew even more intense the night humankind reached the Moon. Like millions of people, I stayed awake following that historic event. Without knowing it, that night planted the seed of many of the stories I would write decades later.

Very young I started a family with my wife, and our three children arrived. I soon understood that the future is not awaited: it is built. I studied International Taxation at the University of Málaga and founded my own professional firm, where for years I advised companies and individuals.

I have always believed that every new challenge deserves new preparation. That conviction led me to complete a three-year master's degree in Management of Real Estate Development and Construction Companies at the University of Málaga before beginning my career as a property developer. Those studies not only expanded my knowledge; they reinforced a philosophy that has guided my whole life: never stop learning.

Together with my wife, a project designer, I founded a real estate development firm with which we carried out large-scale works, even working for members of the royal family of Abu Dhabi and taking part in projects in one of their palaces in Zürich. That experience taught me that constructing a building and writing a novel share the same origin: both are first born in the imagination.

Commitment to society has also been part of my journey. As a member of the Rotary Club Marbella I served as secretary during 2018 and 2019 and as president in the 2019–2020 term. There I confirmed that leadership only has meaning when it is placed at the service of others.

The economic crisis of 2008 marked the beginning of a new stage. I decided to reinvent myself and create a business project linked to sport that, over the years, has grown into an organization that today provides employment for more than one hundred people.

But while my professional life evolved, one thing never changed: I kept writing.

Literature did not come into my life; it had always been there. I began by publishing children's books, perhaps because I never stopped looking at the world with the eyes of that boy who dreamed wide awake. Later I felt the need to explore the genre that best answered the questions that had accompanied me since childhood: science fiction.

That is how Escondido en mi libro was born. Then came Algor, a novel that allowed me to travel, alongside its characters, toward some of humanity's great questions. Later I wrote Benéfico, an intense and deeply human work that confronted me with a reality as painful as it is unsettling. Each book has been different, but all of them have been born from the same need: to better understand the human being and to share with the reader what imagination is capable of revealing.

Today I continue to write, convinced that the best stories not only entertain; they also awaken questions.

Right now I am facing one of the greatest challenges of my literary career: presenting in New York the novel I will publish this September. I do not see that journey as a goal, but as the beginning of a new adventure. My greatest hope is that my stories cross borders, find readers anywhere in the world, and move them.

In parallel, I continue developing new literary and audiovisual projects with the hope of seeing some of my stories adapted for film and television.

After so many years I have come to understand that all the stages of my life — business, construction, sport, service to the community and literature — are not separate paths, but chapters of the same story.

Because I still believe the same thing as that boy who looked up at the stars: that knowledge helps us understand the world, but it is imagination that allows us to discover the worlds that do not yet exist.

Marbella, June 28, 2026

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