On a rain-lashed highway in Tangier, a ghost is born at 4:17 AM.

The mangled wreckage of a Renault Scenic holds the body of a man known on the streets as Ninyo, "El Niño." To the first officers on the scene, it's a tragic but routine accident. But the clues left behind tell a different story—a story written in blood. A single, clean bullet hole whispers of execution. A shattered Rolex, its hands frozen at the precise moment of death, screams of a message. And on the passenger seat, a blood-stained Kleenex box becomes a sinister symbol of innocence corrupted, a chilling prelude to the secrets it once concealed.

The investigation, led by the relentless Captain Riyani, quickly explodes beyond the confines of a simple homicide. The shockwaves of Ninyo's death ripple across continents. In a smoky Brussels café, Ninyo's estranged brothers, Adnan and Ali, receive the news via a cryptic, untraceable call. Their grief is shattered by a chilling sight: a mysterious figure across the street holding a sign with a cross and a crescent moon—✝🌙—Ninyo's private code for ultimate betrayal and imminent danger. The brothers are pulled back into the life they fought to escape, their quest for answers turning into a hunt for vengeance.

From the opulent port of Málaga to the gritty backstreets of the Rif mountains, Riyani follows a bloody paper trail that reveals Ninyo was more than a mid-level smuggler. He was a key player in a five-ton drug war, a ghost moving between the worlds of high finance and brutal street gangs. The investigation uncovers a terrifyingly sophisticated network that hides cocaine in everyday objects, launders money through Geneva banks, and arms its soldiers with weapons stolen from the Spanish military over a decade ago.

But this sprawling criminal empire is protected by a monster far more terrifying than any gangster. In a subterranean laboratory in Sofia, Bulgaria, a brilliant and sadistic chemist known only as Swayko, the "Lord of Poison," perfects toxins that kill without a trace. A man whose only language is death, Swayko is the architect behind the cartel's deadliest operations, a phantom figure whose cruelty is matched only by his genius.

As Riyani's team gets closer to the truth, the hunters become the hunted. The threat becomes devastatingly personal when Riyani's daughter, Rania, is kidnapped from her university in Granada, a pawn in a deadly game orchestrated by an unseen mastermind. The same frozen moment in time—4:17 AM—that marked Ninyo's death now haunts Riyani as a symbol of his own race against fate. To save his daughter, he must bargain with devils, confront ghosts from his own dark past, and navigate a web of deceit where every ally could be a traitor.

El Niño (The Little Boy) is a relentless, multi-layered international thriller that plunges readers into the dark heart of the global drug trade. A saga of family, betrayal, and the brutal cost of truth, it is a cat-and-mouse game played across borders, where fortunes are built on blood and paper trails, and the only certainty is that the road will devour everyone it touches.