"I believe we are all born with a life mission, with certain skills to travel certain paths." After a tapas dinner at the bar, Ariadna Tuxell sips the first mouthful of her strawberry mojito –a passion discovered during the pandemic– and lets herself be swayed by the cadence of Marvin Gaye's Let's get it on. "Since I was little, I had two clear vocations: to be a police officer and to write," she adds.
As a child, Beatriz Torregrosa –this is her real name– always asked to be the police officer in games of cops and robbers, and she took it seriously: "I caught them all!" As a teenager, she prepared herself, gradually meeting the requirements to be able to apply to become a mossa. "And I got in on the first try," of course. "Since then, I have patrolled the streets, been in the prisoner transfer unit and in the unit for victims of domestic and gender violence. Now I've been an instructor in several areas for a few years."
One day in the early part of the last decade, some books crossed her path and activated her other great passion. "The 50 Shades of Grey trilogy fell into my hands and that was what gave me a push to write my stories, in which I combine my experience as a police officer and talk about personal, romantic, sexual relationships..." This is how she became Ariadna Tuxell ("Ariadna is my daughter's name"), a police officer specialized in writing dark romance books, an amalgam of crime, romance, and erotica.
"The first thing I did was write a novel that I shared with my friends and family. At first, I had no more ambition than that, but everyone encouraged me to take the step and, shortly after, in 2013, I published my debut Lo sigo intentando (I Keep Trying), with a small publisher." It was like flipping a switch that can't be turned off again. "It's as if they had given me wings... which I haven't taken off yet," she laughs, because, since then Ariadna has published a whopping seventeen novels, "plus those already delivered and pending publication." Titles like Sombras en la ciudad (Shadows in the City), La duda y el deseo (Doubt and Desire) or Me olvidé de olvidar (I Forgot to Forget), have seen the light for imprints like HakaBooks or Zafiro. But then there's the latest, the eighteenth book... in which Ariadna has stepped aside.
What only Beatriz could tell
In 2014, Biel, Beatriz's second son, was stillborn. "I know that something of me also died, it went with my child." Part of that experience ended up reflected in the novelI would like to love you, but I forgot how to do it, even knowing that, "someday, she would have to tell that story, and for that, Ariadna Tuxell's voice was not going to be the one to do it."The moment arrived in August 2025. "My mother died after a hard fight against cancer; during her illness, I wanted to settle the debt I had with my son's memory, to write a book for him. The day before closing her eyes, my mother smiled and said that the first thing she would do would be to go find her grandson and hug him." She understood, then, that that novel could not only be for her son, but also for her mother, "that she had to create a beautiful literary space for the two of them."
Thus came Te quise, te quiero y siempre te querré (I loved you, I love you, and I will always love you), "which is what I always say when I meditate thinking about them, and which I have signed as Beatriz Torregrosa, of course, because it is a story that only I could tell, and not Ariadna." The novel is part of a grieving process in which the author works day by day, aware that pain does not go away, but that we learn to live with it. Sometimes, wings serve to fly over abysses.
Meanwhile, these are still there, beating non-stop: "I read and write a lot, I meditate every day, and I love my job. And now I also teach, through Acción y Deseo, the online academy for novice writers that I just set up with a partner."
The two faces of the city
"I like to have Barcelona close, but not to live in it." The writer prefers to live on the margins of a city experienced in its best and worst streets, as a civilian and in uniform. "A city with two faces, beautiful by day, and sinful by night," which, for now, is the setting where all her literary plots unfold."It's a shame that, as happens in so many other cities, here too insecurity and crime turn entire neighborhoods into ghettos," she laments, finishing the last sip of her strawberry mojito.
--- In this bar, you couldn't be safer, so if you fancy another one, you're invited.
The notes of Joss Stone's Super Duper Love liven up the atmosphere. Ariadna Tuxell and Beatriz Torregrosa smile in unison. The night progresses steadily, and the writer captures its flutter, its details, its voices and secrets ready to be transformed into a new story.