The books by Esther García Llovet (Málaga, 1963) can be classified as presumably good, very good or good. The presumably good ones are those that one has not yet read. The rest of those read are divided into good and very good. For example, Gordo de Feria (2021) was good. And this one, from now on, Los guapos is one of the very good ones.
Second part of his Eastern Trilogy (from Spain), which began with Spanish Beauty (2022), set on the Valencian coast, in that very particular underworld that we have assimilated and normalized without being aware of how excessive and humorously strange it all is ( Las Fallas, Benidorm or Rita Barberà). It is not strange that García Llovet flirts with the paranormal in this book, because once we are designing crop circles, what better than making those mysterious circles in the rice fields in front of a campsite in El Saler? If his entry into the noir (non-police) genre was as porous as it should be, his foray into the paranormal bears the same traces.
His novels are always about someone looking for someone to know something. And they are built (or seem to be built) as they are written. García Llovet builds bridges over the void and they always hold up. Furthermore, her hyperrealistic view of us, the characters written in bite-sized pieces, the half-cut dialogues and the tenderness of what has been created, make her a tremendous writer and a stranger to writing about the canon of what is convenient and fashionable.
With the Lieutenant Tresser Trilogy closed, the Aragonese writer takes us to the territory of women faced with the pain of the loss of a child. Her murder will lead him to take justice into his own hands... and make mistakes. A double guilt leads him to cloud a story of revenge that this twist and Plana's job takes to another unconventional place.
Short novel that Raig Verd offers us in Spanish and Catalan by the French author Isabelle Aupy, more in the field of mystery and the desire to hold up a mirror to today's society, than in the noir genre itself.
Who Editorial is a young publisher dedicated to the classic -Golden Age- mystery novel for lovers of the British beyond reason. In this case, we are presented from today to the Frenchman Paul Halter, with one of his impossible mechanics where the fantastic also has a place.
