The Crystal Cuckoo (El cuco de cristal) is another mystery series based on a novel by Javier Castillo. In this series, a stranger comes into a small town where people have disappeared for many years and stirs things up.

Clara (Catalina Sopelana) is a doctor doing her residency in a Madrid hospital. She has a heart attack and wakes up a month later to learn she’s been the recipient of a heart transplant.

Clara wants to know who her donor was. That’s supposed to be private information, but she pieces it together on her own. She thinks it’s a man named Carlos from the small (fictional) town of Yesques. She calls Marta (Itziar Ituño), the man’s mother, and is invited to visit. (That’s Clara and Marta together up at the top.)

When Clara arrives, Marta is welcoming. She wants Clara to stay with her and she tells Clara all about Carlos. While she is visiting, a baby is stolen from it’s carrier almost from under its mother’s nose. The town turns out to search the surrounding forest for the baby. Clara helps and she sees who has the baby, but she faints and he gets away. It was a man in a festival mask doing an odd looking series of movements over the baby.

Now that Clara is invested in the town and the mystery, she learns that many people have disappeared over the years. Mostly women. The timeline swings back and forth from 2003/2004 and 2023 as decades of missing people are introduced into the story and then mysteriously gone.

Marta’s husband, Miguel (Alejandro Garcia), was a cop back in 2003. He was sure that his friend and fellow cop’s uncle Gabriel (Tomás del Estal) had something to do with a fire and the disappearance of his sister years ago. Then Miguel vanished too.

Now in 2023, Miguel’s and Marta’s son (and the brother of heart donor Carlos) is all grown up. His name is Juan (Alfons Nieto) and he’s a cop, too. His boss is Rafael (Ivan Massagué), the former best friend of Miguel and the nephew of the suspicious uncle Gabriel.

We jump back and forth in the timeline with this set of characters. The clues come together in a sensible order. Not a lot of red herrings in this plot. But there are some surprises in the way everything works out.

There was some symbolism about predators and some mystical hints that Clara was feeling emotions that came from her transplanted heart. But otherwise it was putting together the clues from two timelines that solved the mystery.

I had some difficulty accepting that the townspeople believed that all those people, particularly the young attractive women, disappeared overnight because they chose to run off. Must have been sluts who ran off with some man, right? Patriarchy sucketh mightily.

I know some of my readers refuse to watch anything that shows you scenes of women being abused and murdered. This is one of those series.

Laura Alvea directed 4 of the 6 episodes, which you can see on Netflix in the original Spanish or dubbed in English.