A bestselling female author was revealed to be three men. The episode tells a deeper story.

In Mola’s case, however, the authors and their agent, a woman, fed a marketing campaign around a false identity, relying on cliches such as the idea that women don’t write gory thrillers and that, if they do, they would probably be ashamed to admit it. Some readers now say that they always thought Mola was a man because of the level of cruelty in the books. Other authors claim to have known this for a while and blame Spanish journalists for not doing their jobs properly. A Madrid-based feminist bookstore called Mujeres y Compañía made the point of sending Mola’s novels back to the publishing house, saying “what’s cool is that men don’t take all the space.”