To The Last Page

Having read the first two Inspectora Elena Blanco novels by Carmen Mola, I knew to expect to be prepared for some dark scenes of horrific crime, but the authors (Mola a pseudonym used by a collaborative team of three male authors - Jorge Díaz, Agustín Martínez and Antonio Mercero) still manage to shock with the extreme violence and twisted actions that take place early in the first few chapters of La Nena ('The Kid'). Without wanting to get too deeply into it, the prologue ends with a horrific scene involving a newly married woman entering a family that raise pigs to discover that some of the family members appear to be closely related to the animals, but it doesn't take long into the novel proper for another even more shocking event to surpass it. And it's a very surprising one at that. That's because the victim is someone readers of the series will already know. Chesca is one of Elena Blanco’s specialist murder investigation BAC team (Brigada de Análysis de Caso...

Tomás Nevinson opens, as you might expect in a novel by Javier Marías, with a long preamble to set the scene. It's not an uncommon subject that he contemplates, but one that has been thought about and speculated upon by many others. What if someone has taken one of the many opportunities or been successful in an attempted assassination of Hitler before he became responsible for the deaths of millions of people? But how could anyone have known what he would become?  There is a good reason why this subject might be of interest to the narrator of Tomás Nevinson - who is Tom himself - and the reason you could say was already proposed by a longer preamble to this book, although I doubt there is any way that anyone could consider the author’s previous novel (which would turn out to be his penultimate work), Berta Isla as merely a preamble. As far as Tomás Nevinson is concerned however - the book and the husband of Berta Isla that is - his activities as an undercover operative, spy, ag...

I remarked in my earlier review of La novia gitana , the first book in Carmen Mola's Inspectora Elena Blanco series, that possibly the least convincing aspect of the book - which nonetheless was quite a brilliant thriller - was the characterisation of the inspector Blanco herself. Chief of the specialist murder investigation team BAC, Brigada de Análysis de Casos, The Case Analysis Brigade, the characterisation seemed sensationalist and superficial. She drives a Lada, likes grappa, singing Italian karaoke songs and likes having sex with strangers in SUVs in the underground parking of the plaza Mayor in Madrid, where she has an apartment. The revelation that these quirks were just her way of combatting the pain and guilt over the disappearance of her son eight years previously didn't make that any more human. It still felt like cheap, lazy characterisation. Over the course of La novia gitana , Blanco was rounded out more and that novel brought that trauma back to the fore at it...

With more than a million copies sold, translated into 15 languages (but not English), La novia gitana is the first in a series of thrillers featuring inspector Elena Blanco. Initially the author Carmen Mola was considered a pseudonym for an author who wanted to remain out of the picture and avoid publicity, a sort of Elena Ferrante, but while it is indeed a pseudonym, Carmen Mola is actually a collaboration between three writers, none of them female. However they choose to work, there is no denying the success of the series and the reasons for this success are not hard to discern in this first book made up of short sharp chapters, spiky characters and a bizarre murder mystery, but that's only the start of it. The gypsy bride of the title is Susana Macaya. She is murdered two weeks before her wedding in the most shocking and macabre manner while sensibly returning home from her hen party in Madrid just before it all got out of control. She has been killed by someone who drilled thr...

In a manner that is becoming familiar with the series involving half-Spanish half-German Frankfurt police Commissioner Cornelia Weber, En caída libre (In Free Fall) opens with two apparently unrelated cases, a Spanish connection and new complications in the Commissioner's personal life. The prologue presents the situation of an airline cleaning lady Fatima Celik, dying after a fall down the stairway of a plane that has just arrived from Santiago, Chile. Although accidental there is a suspicion that drugs were hastily removed from her pocket by a colleague just after the fall. Cornelia's involvement with this case arises out of another death. As with the first book in the series, Entre dos aguas , it arises out of the Main river in the form of the dead dismembered body of a young woman, Nicole Eulenberg, weighted down with stones and washed up on the shore at Niederrad. There is a Spanish or Spanish language connection in both cases, suspicion being thrown on a flight from Chil...

You'd think that Javier Marías would have fully explored the Oxford connections and its spy recruitment network from every conceivable angle now through  Todos las almas  and the expansive Tu rostro mañana trilogy. Not to mention where they run up against personal and marriage issues in the final book of the latter but with Javier Marías there are always new and interesting lines to delve into and new angles to approach it from. Berta Isla initially puts relationships at the heart of the book, as evidenced indeed by the follow-up carrying the name of her husband, Tomás Nevinson. It has to be said however that their marriage doesn't really get a chance to sit on any stable ground. They are both from different backgrounds. Berta a Madrileña at heart, Tom with an English father and Spanish mother has a talent for languages that sees him just as much at home in England. They have been a couple for a long time and are well matched in temperament, but there is a tendency not to spe...

If you're going to pick up Spanish language thrillers based on Amazon recommendations and bestsellers - and I expect I'll have to eventually get around to reading Juan Gómez-Jurado - you're going to come across Cristian Perfumo's Patagonia thrillers, not least because they appear to be self-published through Amazon. Personally I found the unusual setting of Patagonia - a region hardly comparable with the crime centres of the world by any means -  incentive enough to download a sample of Dónde enterré a Fabiana Orquera (Where I Buried Fabiana Orquera), and good enough to go on and buy the full download. Living in small town of Puerto Deseado in the Santa Cruz region of Argentina in Patagonia, Nahuel, a teacher by profession who also writes for the local newspaper, is spending Christmas and the new year at the the remote Las Maras farm, the home of friends of his family, Dolores and Carlucho Nievas. Also staying there is their daughter Valeria and her boyfriend Pablo. Th...

Los enamoramientos opens with the narrator describing in detail a couple she used to watch every morning at a cafe before she started work at the office of a nearby publishing house. (The later realisation that it is a female comes as a surprise when you are used to the observational voice of the author as Juan Deza in Tu rostro mañana ). María Dolz sees Luisa and Miguel Desvern (or Deverne) as the perfect couple, immaculately turned out, classic in their style and manner, but not ostentatious. It's a little daily ritual that amuses her to observe, but at the time of her " pequeño estímulo matutino " she was unaware of their names, any kind of acquaintance restricted to merely visual observation with a vague nod of acknowledgement, so it takes a while to associate the newspaper report of a man killed in a knife crime with the murder of Deverne. Unlike a typical novel that would explore the underlying motivations or even randomness of the murder (a carpark attendant with ...

The start of this decade has been tough on Spanish literature with the premature deaths of at least two notable writers. The death of Javier Marías in 2022 was certainly noted in the UK, but not so much Almudena Grandes who died less than a year earlier of cancer at the age of 61. That's perhaps understandable as few of her works have been translated into English, but she was a major figure in Spain and particularly associated with her home city of Madrid. As writers, the two were very different in style and content, Marías certainly the more literary of the two, but Grandes had her own important part to play in the chronicling of lives in her works. No more so than in her final series of novels, Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes from an interminable war), works all centred on a painful subject kept under a veil of silence that few had tackled directly; the horrors of the Civil War and the lasting impact of the Franco years.  My experience of reading Almudena Grandes t...

In a way that now seems typical of Rosa Ribas's Commissioner Cornelia Weber series, even after just reading the first book Entre dos aguas , the second book in the series Con anuncio  (which translates something like 'As Announced') opens with what you might call a low-key explosive situation. A package has been delivered to a publicity agency in Frankfurt that explodes on opening. The device only showers confetti over the terrified receptionist, but there is a message inside that warns that the next one will be real. The Baumgard & Holder agency is in competition for a contract to run a major campaign for the city of Frankfurt, one that promotes cultural, ideological and religious tolerance in a multicultural society. The city suffers a reputation of being one of the most dangerous in Germany and that image won't be improved by the threats made against an agency hoping to promote a campaign of tolerance. It's not the only threat that has been made. Several anon...

Not all cases are as easily resolved as Mrs Merckele, who has been charged with the killing of her husband, even though both are elderly and not the kind of people you expect to be the subject of a murder investigation. After his death, a secret room was found in the office of Jörg Merckele who worked in the banking sector, an Aladdin's cave, filled with numerous purchases, from jewellery and CDs to gym equipment. His wife has murdered him, suspecting an affair because of the spending on his bank accounts, but she is unrepentant even when she finds out that he has been hoarding so much over the years. That case is quickly wrapped up and the paperwork done rather in a rush, because there is another more troubling case for Commissioner Cornelia Weber and her homicide team. The weather has been bad in Frankfurt, causing flooding and bringing the city traffic to a standstill, and the Main river has thrown up a dead body, wrapped around one of the pillars of the Alte Brücke bridge. The ...

Looking to explore some more Spanish language fiction, particularly in the field of crime fiction and thrillers, I'm afraid I didn't get on well with Juan Ramón Biedma's Luz poniente and left it unfinished. In my defense, I'm going pretty much blind into the world of Spanish crime fiction, trying out some names and recommendations that I have picked up. I think it might be better in future to work on sample downloads to get an idea or what is and what is not worthwhile. Although, when you are reading in Spanish, you are at least sharpening up you language skills, so it's never totally wasted time. It often felt like it however reading Luz poniente (The Setting Light), and it feels almost as much as a chore trying to summarise it. I will be rolling my eyes throughout as I write this. I haven't read The Da Vinci Code , although I did see the movie of the Dan Brown second book Angels & Demons and thought it was entertaining hokum. You could maybe look at Luz...

Published in 1992, his seventh novel, Corazón tan blanco is the novel that launched Javier Marías onto the international stage as a writer with a distinct and unique voice. It has also proved to be one of his more popular and enduring books, one that touches on themes, characters and subjects that would be developed further in his later work, to such an extent that his body of work feels like a consistent exploration and refinement of preoccupying ideas, worked though in a number of ways. It's almost impossible to review such a book without relating the 'plot' (such as it is), since everything and nothing may be relevant to what it is about. This novel itself weaves through several situations that can be seen to mirror or parallel each other, or perhaps inform and distort how one views the other, or perhaps between them they amount to something else. A lot of perhapses but that's the nature of how Marías works. What is definitely significant and certainly has repercuss...

Written in 1973, Los soldados de Cataluña was published in 1975 under the title La verdad sobre el caso Savolta on the recommendation of the Spanish censor. It was published then in the same year as the death of Franco, and although it doesn't directly address the events leading up to the dictatorship, there is an entwined history in how Eduardo Mendoza covers the social and political climate at the turn of the century. Mendoza's methods and style are unconventional, as capable of writing satirical comedies and SF adventures as political and social issues, but even in that wide range of writing, even while writing comedy, he remains for me a great chronicler of the history and people of Barcelona and the enormous upheavals it has experienced over the course of the 20th century. His first fictional novel sets the scene of that intriguing past at the beginning of the 20th century. On the 1st January 1918, businessman Enrique Savolta y Gallibos is assassinated during a high soci...