Rosa Ribas (El Prat de Llobregat, 1963) closes the first of the trilogies that has the Hernández family as protagonists. As the reader of Ribas already knows, the Hernándezes are a family (father, mother, children, some crazy aunt in the garden) who face the reality of being a dysfunctional tribe personally and a Detective Agency at work. In this third book, after the murder of one of its members, the Agency does not work, but inertia causes all the Hernándezes to end up committing the guilty pleasure, cheating, finding, monitoring, solving and changing the drawer where they keep secrets.
Ribas, a solid and effective writer in all her books, starting from the first, with a historical bias – The Painter of Flanders – her career has been defined by the ease with which she undertakes the noir genre without ceasing to make it entertaining and literary at the same time.
The plot introduces us to Armand Rocamora, yet another smoke seller from Barcelona. The young man has disappeared and it could be a voluntary flight as well as revenge. Rocamora is not who he claims to be, nor does he do what he claims to do, nor does he have the life that he presumes to lead. There are echoes of Mendoza and the first Carvalho, in a gender exercise without violence where everyone persecutes each other. As in good genre novels, the plot is the excuse for the author to talk about what matters to her. The family, the relationships between its members and that look that tells us that the family is both a refuge and a prison, the thread that guides us in the labyrinth and the rope hanging from a beam.
Dausà showed author credentials with personality in previous books. Here he transports us to the classic game of the wrong suitcase to place the protagonist in the slide of a thriller where the enemy is hypervigilance and the technology that we place as guardians of our security.
The journalist who fascinated us with his take on the violence in Northern Ireland gives us these true stories about criminals. With his enviable way of looking and telling, he draws portraits of characters as parodic as they are cruel, stupid and insane, tender and horrible. Talent and rigor.
For those who ask about the state of health of crime novels, Pery is one of their answers. Prequel to Flies, it uses the same character: the policeman Iñaki Altolaguirre, this time, in the world of Basque terrorism. Victims –all–, violence, bad host and also black humor.
