One is persistently fond of thrillers, which I inherited from my father, a faithful reader of Georges Simenon, S.S. Van Dine, Rex Stout and Ellery Queen, among others (the hard-boiled school of Hammett and Chandler didn’t interest him that much).
Like my parent, I have a tendency to follow those authors who, in addition to liking me, publish regularly. The serial character is important in the detective genre: the reader enjoys familiarity with the recurring characters, with their daily lives and minor incidents that serve as a warm counterweight to the disturbing and/or bloody environments, as well as the forced rationality of the story. investigation.
Spring 2023 has brought new works from writers I read regularly, highly recommended for anyone looking for entertaining August reads.
John Verdon launched into the novel after a long advertising career. In Spain, many thousands of copies have been sold by the Roca publishing house, recently acquired by the Penguin Random House group. His character is ex-NYPD policeman Dave Gurney, who lives with his wife Madeleine, like Verdon himself, in a rural house in upstate New York. Gurney takes on assignments and Verdon often captures him trudging in his car through the twisting roads of the Catskills Mountains.
In The Favor, Gurney solves the old case that landed a well-known tennis player in jail, in a read not suitable for herpetophobes. The intrigue is entertaining, but what gives it substance, once again, is that frieze of manners of mature urbanites dedicated to DIY, horticulture and animal husbandry in the middle of a cold bald.
The Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child tandem have created one of the most original figures in contemporary thriller, the millionaire special agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast, sophisticated protagonist of splendid Gothic works like The Manhattan Murders. The extensive Pendergast series (some twenty works) was showing clear signs of fatigue, and Preston / Child have taken over with his young protégé, agent Corrie Swanson.
In his second adventure, The Scorpion’s Sting (Plaza
There is a brief cameo by Pendergast and as usual with Preston/Child the quaintness, quirky scholarship and humor are not lacking.
The Irishman John Connolly is the father of the American detective Charlie Parker, a regular frequenter of the domains of terror and parapsychology. Regular follower as I am of his adventures, the last two installments seemed too long and somewhat repetitive.
In Nameless Tombs (Tusquets) Connolly has the wisdom to refresh his territory giving prominence to his usual Louis and Angel, endearing murderers, worth the oxymoron, against a well-documented (and shockingly evil) Serbian plot with its epicenter in Amsterdam.
Finally, John Grisham (the third John of this selection). The king of legal thrillers, unlike the other authors mentioned here, doses his series –Theodore Boone’s youth series and Camino Island’s short series– and in his extensive production he does not usually repeat characters. But his plots with lawyers are unmistakable. The Adversaries (Square
The last one, which gives the book its name, deals with two rival brothers who share a law firm, while the father, also a tough lawyer, plots dark maneuvers from the jail where he is serving a sentence. And Grisham provides a message about the slippery limits of the law that takes us back to that splendid portrait of America in the 1990s, also the author’s best-known novel, which he titled The Firm.