The Garden of Animals with Soul
A body is found floating in a tank of Lisbon’s Oceanarium Park. All clues point to Maria Flor as the murderer. The police arrests her. Only one man can help her – her husband, Tomás Noronha.
To prove her innocence, Tomás has to find the real author of the crime. This leads him to the victim’s secretive project – and to the mysteries within Hieronymus Bosch’s most esoteric painting. At the end of the quest lies one of Nature’s most wonderful secrets: the intelligence, the emotions and the consciousness of animals.
A body is found floating in a tank of Lisbon’s Oceanarium Park. All clues point to Maria Flor as the murderer. The police arrests her. Only one man can help her – her husband, Tomás Noronha.
To prove her innocence, Tomás has to find the real author of the crime. This leads him to the victim’s secretive project – and to the mysteries within Hieronymus Bosch’s most esoteric painting. At the end of the quest lies one of Nature’s most wonderful secrets: the intelligence, the emotions and the consciousness of animals.
Who is the real killer? Why was the victim murdered? What is the relationship between the homicide and Bosch’s mystic painting? And, above all, what is the connection between this murder and the genocide carried out by human beings against life in our planet?
Who are the real beasts? The animals – or we?
With The Garden of Animals With Soul, the master of European real mystery novels is back with an adventure that sets humans before Nature and shows us how beastly are humans and how human are beasts. Based on the latest scientific research on ethology, José Rodrigues dos Santos forces us to stare at Humankind’s darkest face
"Despite being a novel, written with a skilful plot that grabs the reader to its pages in a pleasurable way, this book offers much more than mere entertainment. He deeply studied our relationship with animals. At the end, he provides a wide bibliography, almost as if this is an academic work. While reading it, and beyond its detective story, this book compels us to meditate about a rough reality.
The way we deal with animals reflects many imperfections that throw the shadow of shame and guilt over the human condition (...) José Rodrigues dos Santos correctly identifies the ethical essence of this subject: 'The way we deal with animals defines what we are. We have obligations towards them, not because they have rights, but precisely because they don't have them, because they are impotent before us, because they are under our mercy and the duty of the strong is to respect and defend the defenceless'."
