Toni Hill’s literary career has always moved in a proposal where quality is only understood if it goes hand in hand with entertainment. There is a commitment to the reader who expects to find in a genre book what she is looking for and what she does not expect. Hill is as much a fan of Hitchcock as he is of Highsmith and if there was any doubt about that, here is The Last Hangman.
The Barcelonan author assumes the direction and preparation of a tightly crafted thriller, but in the stew the ingredients are all succulent. As usual, it moves the different plot lines well, the characters are credible, they act and speak to carry the plot forward, where the classic twist awaits that makes it another thriller from the news table, not just another thriller.
In The Last Hangman, we witness the existence of a serial killer who takes justice into his own hands, killing people who, for reasons unknown to the reader, deserve it at his discretion. The vigilante angel that is Thomas, uses the vile club, one of the contributions to the barbarism of this country. The character of the murderer, a Ripleyan impostor, is charismatic, producing a cognitive dissonance between what he does and who he is, disturbingly and clearly of the genre when it takes flight. We witness a series of everyday scenes, relationships between the characters, the murderer, the victims, the policemen, the forensic psychologist, a former Russian mafioso, destroyed and destructive mothers, a wonderful chorus of Furies with tracksuits and baby carriages, and everything this with the elegant walk of Hill’s prose, that disturbing calm that we feel watching The Rope or the paranoid lines that assail us when Tom Ripley is about to be unmasked.
The debut of a great. Business card of his two detectives: Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Many of the American author’s obsessions were already here: racism, society as always balanced on a Santa Barbara, boiling over social injustices, the corrupt threads of politics, as well as many of his virtues. Knowing how to explain a moment, a place, some heroes by accident, a fascinating and cruel society.
Code 60 is a homicide alert. On the breakwater of Ribes Roges beach in Vilanova i la Geltrú, there is the sculpture of Pasifae. This reproduces the Greek myth of the wife of King Minos. Inside that sculpture appears the corpse of a woman. Maria Rosa Nogué takes up the police genre again, with the usual ingredients and a good narrative pulse.
Everything you hope to find in a Midwestern country noir is in this novel, published a decade ago and now served up to us. The biting narrative of the litter of these guys -that we now find in Sajalin, Malastierras or Dirty Works among other publishers- shakes us from Larry Brown to Ray Pollock, in a hell of violence, drugs, stupidity, caravans in the middle of the forest and a stubborn will to survive to stay in the shit.
