“Killing is fun.”
The one who signs needs to start the chronicle by the phrase of Toni Hill (Barcelona, ??1966). So accustomed to dealing with crimes of flesh and blood, suddenly facing a crime novel author who kills, a lot and well, for pure pleasure, produces chills. This crime author enjoys talking about his latest literary work as much as he assures that he enjoyed writing The Last Executioner (Grijalbo), a well-rounded work, set in Barcelona in 2021 and inspired by Nicomedes Méndez, the executor who had the Catalan capital until the beginning of the Last century.
Until now, Hill had resisted the pure thriller with a psychopath in the lead, because he was in a hurry to repeat the most classic patterns. He wanted to innovate. Create a different character. And boy did he make it. “I had a vile club and a vigilante executioner that I ended up turning into a serial killer capable of creating an unusual psychopath to justify what he did.”
An attractive protagonist who seduces the reader from his irruption and who confronts him with his most unspeakable contradictions. “Who hasn’t wished for someone’s death at some time?” the author wonders. The executioner randomly chooses some victims who “deserve to die” for the injustices they have carried out and which the author carefully details. So much so that he manages to elicit feelings of empathy towards a vigilante who arrives where true justice cannot be. The murderer leaves a note as a visiting card that reads: “Someone has to do it.”
Knowing from the first moment who the murderer is, the baddest in a story of terrible characters, does not take away an iota of emotion and intrigue from the novel. What he is about, and herein lies the difficulty in creating, is moving forward, run after run to try to understand why he does it. “That is the challenge, to catch you until you reach the last answer that is missing.”
And it succeeds, because the work pushes you to reflect, lowers you to hell and perfectly fulfills the main function of good thrillers, which is to entertain and fall asleep with the book in your arms, because you refuse to abandon his luck to that unclassifiable guy who kills ruthlessly in the basement of his elegant house.
What matters least is the way in which the investigators, in this case the Mossos d’Esquadra whom the author knows well, work on the case. But when they do appear, they do so with the rigor that the plot deserves to be told well.
The author advances the trend increasingly established in the homicide groups of the police that work in Spain to include in the investigation a criminal profiler, Lena Mayoral, the counterpoint of the murderer. A criminologist who participates in social gatherings, she writes books and helps the Mossos in drawing up a profile of the man they are looking for.
An unusual protagonist, as Hill acknowledges with satisfaction. “I didn’t want an empowered 20-something who has made a place for herself in a world of men. I wanted a normal woman, who doesn’t stand out, who has an organized life, who would never star in a novel because she mistakenly believes that she has nothing to tell, but that she grows in the book”. Because she also keeps her secrets.
“Perversion has no limits,” admits the author. Let them tell this one who signs. So much so that despite being fictional, it is not hard to imagine an executioner in any basement of a Barcelona apartment murdering his victims with an iron punch penetrating the base of the skull, in order to kill faster.