The bookstores reopen and they do so with as many difficulties as illusion and patience. I like those of real booksellers, with judgment, prescribers and great readers. But under the current conditions they cannot do their job and you have to go with the tasks done. So I propose three great novels in every way, three novels that have been in bookstores for a long time but whose quality will make them last. Look for them. All three have more than solid authors behind; all three exceed 600 pages; all three are ambitious and achieve their goal; all three are the best of criminal fiction that you will find when you go to your bookstore.
Any other day , Dennis Lehane (Salamandra, translation by Enrique de Hériz). Choosing a novel among all those written by the great Lehane is always difficult. Let's remove the ones from Kenzie and Gennaro (very fan, but it's not what we are looking for today) and bet on this one. Why? Because it is a book in which Lehane plays it off, gets out of his comfort zone, widens his sights and hits the nail on the head. Because it is the first in the series by Joe Coughlin and whoever begins to share pages with this Irishman inevitably arrives at the twilight The disappeared world on a path loaded with real literature. Because it skillfully mixes the historical and the criminal in anticipation of a trend so in vogue today. Because, in times of pandemic, he talks about the plague of 1918 not through wikipédico paragraphs but introducing a terrifying factor in the context of the story. Because it does the same, for example, with anarchism, so in vogue in the post-World War I world. And because it is translated by the great Enrique de Hériz, whom we already miss. I don't think it will take more.
El Olmo's Secret , Tana French (DNA, translation by Julia Osuna). The other day I was listening again to the interview that The New York Times Book Review did to the indisputable crack of current criminal fiction and I was surprised to discover new keys to a disturbing book that months after reading it has not stopped growing in my head . French departs here from the stories of the Dublin Homicide department, which has given glorious episodes such as Intrusion or Faithfull place , to put us before a mystery that in a way has a conventional cut - what does that, better not gut anything, in that elm - and using, in addition, an unreliable narrator, another classic resource, But French twists this approach and these elements to offer a psychological, police suspense with certain elements of procedural - one in which the police are almost annoying presences - and a family drama, all together in a novel in which if no spectacular turn or jump the author is able to keep them glued for more than 600 pages and question ourselves as the poor protagonist what is also our perception of reality
The Frontier , Don Winslow (Harper Collins, translation by Victoria Horrillo). A trilogy that begins with The Power of the Dog is very difficult to end up high. And yet, after the remarkable El cartel , Don Winslow signs his most ambitious work at La Frontera , a totalizing portrait of the world of drug traffickers, of those who traffic and those who fight against trafficking, and also of those who They are in between and those who are on one side or the other depending on the moment and the need. A story in which the hero at times, the antihero at other times and the imperfect man whenever he is Art Keller is completed by one of the great characters of contemporary fiction. There is action, hatred, corruption, conspiracy, love and a lot of entertainment in this great novel about one of the great themes of criminal history, treated from the most exciting perspective and setting that there can be.