Few authors can boast such a degree of sophisticated and lurid imagination. Sandrone Dazieri is relentless and, despite what has been said, not at all gimmicky. From the tremendous You are not alone to this meaning-filled mandate: Do not flee (Alfaguara) part of the kidnapping and captivity – and better not give details – of a teenager who does not give up.
In a successful combination of history, reflection, and pure thriller, Toni Hill gets an excellent book. The last executioner (Grijalbo) revolves around an unclassifiable guy. There is real life, a fancy world, and art and craft, in fiction and in Hill’s excellent career.
Time has its reasons and buries old issues. Or so it is intended in the scattered Hernández family created by Rosa Ribas. Astutely, the author allows a few years to pass to see what has become of these parents and children who ran a detective agency in Sant Andreu. Our dead (Tusquets) is a mirror in which we reflect.
Since I know what you’re thinking, every return is flawless. John Verdon created the elegant and cerebral David Gurney, so that, in spite of him, he will return to acting, even if his reputation and his freedom are destroyed. That is what El favor (Roca) is about, which he does to a good friend and who is about to put him in jail. You don’t play with the law of others.
Excellent initiative, the recovery of Shane Stevens, of whom only the occasional title is found. Ciutat morta / Dead City (Crims.cat / Sakhalin) was originally published in 1973 and packs a formidable punch from the first page. How a boy gets selected to be a professional thug, how the others share the profits to take control of New Jersey. Bars, girls, murder by beatings. A great portrait of people – there are some unforgettable ones – who find no other way to embrace the American dream.
There are two protagonists who have pocketed the author of these lines. I surrender to the wisdom of Julia Seales. American, he adores Agatha Christie and Victorian elegance. The result is this young woman of deserving age, of smiling in large halls, but when she sees a suitor she calls him “suspected of crime.” Her secret criminalistic vocation, which she cultivates in secret, is about to come true in the mischievous and intelligent A Crime with Class (Lumen).
Without betraying Beatrice, I present Úrsula. I adore her from the first line. Mercedes Rosende is a Uruguayan author – Galician with a long history and, now we know, extremely talented. We are in Montevideo and good Úrsula goes to a meeting of Gordos Anónimos. This is her, a chubby girl with no future and punished. Until some rookie kidnappers mistake her for the wife of a businessman. Don’t miss Wrong Woman (Backwards).
Jean Ezequiel is a singular type, stubborn, imaginative and full of truth. Juan Carlos Galindo, a great connoisseur and prescriber of the noir genre, makes his debut with a terrible subject in a small Segovian city that is breathed in every corner. Hontoria (Salamandra) is the scene of the bloody crime of a family (good people, it is said of them) that this young man bitten by the bug of criminal curiosity since childhood changes his life.
Filmmaker and writer, Roberto Santiago dares with the pharmaceutical multinational. He has dared with other themes, with great success: his series Futbolísimos, for example. With La rebellion de los buenos (Planeta), the same title contains a beautiful utopia. The illusion that a lawyer who doesn’t have much to lose will risk it all when he doesn’t even trust his millionaire client. With this tense story, he has deservedly won the Fernando Lara 2023 award.
A paragraph of perplexity, admiration and joy: The Silos tavern (Tusquets) describes a criminal affair in a monastery. About Lorenzo G. Acebedo we are told that he once embraced a religious vocation. He is glad that he has embraced this other one, because his novel is magnificent as an intrigue and as a creation of the world. And because the reader cannot stop following these monks, each one extraordinary and in his own way, and with the literary participation of Gonzalo de Berceo.
And speaking of difficult territories, the one that the journalist Toni Aira treads at a good pace: Cos a terra (La Campana) is his leap into fiction, with this thriller told by a political adviser, in the midst of a thorny, fearsome electoral campaign. Sounds like something to us.
This summer, if the reader continues to miss the young Endeavour, turn to the second installment of Colin Dexter’s Morse series without hesitation. Young Valerie was last seen (Siruela) too long ago, long enough to be presumed dead. But the assertive Morse finds himself, days later, drinking a gin and tonic in his mother’s living room. In this matter of drinking during working hours, and in other matters, Morse was wrong.
