If Juan Carlos Galindo starts talking about crimes, he can spend “the whole afternoon.” He has been addicted to true crime since he was little. But not to any murder, no matter how horrendous. What he is passionate about are “great unsolved homicides when they become good literature.”
Galindo is a journalist and the logical thing is that he would have entered the ranks of the police section, but he has always been in culture and, now, to get away “from the danger of falling into crime journalism”, Hontoria (Salamandra) has written, where he turns his love for black chronicle through Jean Ezequiel, a Segovian editor (in this case of events) who is still his alter ego.
Hontoria is a small town today converted into a neighborhood of Segovia. One of those places where nothing ever happens. Until Galindo decided to make him the protagonist of this novel, very entertaining and perhaps somewhat expiatory. One night someone enters a house belonging to the Vila family and savagely murders the couple formed by Joaquín and Consuelo and their 12-year-old son Sergio.
Suspicions fall on Jaime, the son who has survived, but the hand of justice hangs over Abundio, another resident of the town. Ezequiel doubts the official resolution of the case and expresses his concern in the pages of the newspaper for which he works and, above all, in a podcast, with which he achieves some professional recognition.
This plot gives Galindo the opportunity to review some of those unresolved real cases that he is passionate about, such as Jeremy’s, Alcàsser’s, the minor from Somosierra, the child painter from Malaga… Because no matter how calm they are, all Spanish cities have their mysteries. Sometimes real, other literary. From Vigo to Seville, the whole of Spain is represented in the darkest novel. (See attached map: A bloodhound for each area).
Rosa Ribas knows this very well, after spending many years in Germany, she has returned to Barcelona and has made the city one of the protagonists of her trilogy about the Hernández family of detectives, of which she is now publishing the third installment, Our Dead. (Tusquets).
Ribas wrote the first two novels “from nostalgia.” Later, when he returned to Barcelona and realized that “the city is not depressed as is repeated everywhere, on the contrary, it enjoys an effervescent cultural life” and to get out of that cliché it occurred to him to “create a macro event, a Universal Exhibition, which would turn the Catalan capital once again into the city of wonders”.
The Hernándezes resume their detective tasks thanks to a disappearance linked to that Universal Exposition, which also serves Ribas to “show the opportunism and classism that are manifested in this type of large event.” But also, thanks to that excuse, the writer takes her characters, natives of the Sant Andreu neighborhood, for a walk throughout the city.
Some atypical characters, because everyone in the Hernández family investigates, and that contrasts with the image of “the classic detective, who doesn’t usually have a family.” However, the Hernándezes are not a family to use, “because they are loaded with secrets and live on the edge of legality.” Ribas is interested in showing the perverse side of Mateo, his wife, and his daughters, so that “readers perceive the extent to which his can justify evil and confront him with his own moral limits.”
And speaking of moral limits: would it be lawful to rejoice that abusive and abusive male chauvinists began to drop dead like flies? That is the starting point of The Botox Band (Orpheus), the new novel by Pilar Sánchez Vicente. The writer recovers the inspector Sara Ocaña who, stationed in Gijón, has to face a serial killer whose crimes are terrifying.
“The victims are injected with Botox, which is still a poison, and they are completely paralyzed, they are tortured and they are able to see what is happening because their brain still works,” Sánchez Vicente explained to La Vanguardia during the week Black from Gijón in which he has participated.
Once again, the city becomes one of the protagonists of the book “starting from the El Natahoyo library, where Lola works, the disconsolate widow of the first dead man, and where a book club meets that has a lot to say. .”, adds the author whose work is promoted along with Botox injections in the window of one of the main pharmacies in Gijón.
And if evil is present in Honturia, Nuestro muertos and La banda del botox , it reaches unsuspected limits in La rebellón de los buenos, the latest book by Roberta Santiago, winner of this year’s Fernando Lara Award. When Jeremías Abi, a modest lawyer from Carabanchel, is divorced from the multimillionaire Fátima Montero, owner of a large pharmaceutical company, he should have suspected that something strange was happening.
But turned into a kind of Philip Marlowe from Madrid, Abi accepts the case that will take him to the ninth circle of a Dantesque hell. And on top of that, in Madrid in the middle of July: “Madrid is a city that is sometimes impassable in summer, hostile in many aspects,” points out Santiago, who is an admirer of Patricia Highsmith and since she has wanted to give La rebellion de los buenos “a physicality to the spaces so that the reader can locate himself and feel that Madrid that is so hot from Carabanchel to the San Jerónimo street”.
But going through a scorching Madrid is not the worst thing that happens to Abi, who plunges into the dark world of the pharmaceutical industry, while dealing with her daughter’s problems, with those of her father, with a drug trafficker who persecutes him, with a corrupt prosecutor, with a girlfriend he doesn’t want to leave on the wedding day, with an ex who causes him certain little problems… “During the writing of La rebellion de los buenos I was on the verge of a heart attack,” he confesses Santiago. Readers who start it won’t be able to put it down.