Xavier Theros (Barcelona, 1963) is an artist with a deep personality in what he does. Chance has made the winds now blow in his favor, since the noir novel is always a vampire that when it shows signs of weakness, originality or exaggeration, looks for bodies to parasitize. It is the case, the fashion this season, of pairing historical novel with police, detective, that province of the crime novel as an immense and mestizo country. Theros, like others - Jambrina, for example - has been working that vein for many years. He does it with rigor and passion, but also with the healthy aspiration of entertaining and not offending the reader's intelligence.
He recovers the protagonist of La fada negra (2017), Llàtzer Llampades to take another step in his great project of ten novels that show a part of the Catalan 19th century, specifically from 1843 to 1868. Llampadas is taken from prison to enroll in a a kind of paramilitary army in charge of stopping a series of trabucaires who, under the lure of the eternal Carlist war, draw up their own laws and looting: pure far west. With those ingredients, we would like Theros stew. But he also provides his literature with the historical rigor of small things, of everyday life in a wonderful sketch of the fears that urban prisoners have to face in the face of a new, rural, wild world, centuries away from what is said and done. He lives in Barcelona, these are the times.
Under the classic framework of a topical crime (millionaire murdered in her apartment), Lassa sets up a circus troupe with extreme characters but without parody or cliché, contributing to the genre the avenues that talent always grants: how it is told and not what.
The end of the debate about Pérez-Reverte usually ends when you start reading it. Especially in those novels where he does what he knows how to do well and forgets to try to do what he does less well. And when he enjoys (and makes us enjoy) tailored suits like this Holmesian story but a little further and also more here.
Duomo allows us the second opportunity to share hours with that former prosecutor transformed into a detective, Penelope Spada. Good dialogues, lightness in the steps and desire to explain a story well without rushing but also without laziness.
