Bruno Blog

He took four steps and saw her. A girl. Eighteen or nineteen years, at most. Thin and with the hair turned and long to the chest. Almond eyes, fleshy lips, very marked cheekbones and straight nose and much finer than most black ones he had seen. Beautifulness… With all the panic that shook his face. The butchery began just below the sternum.Matinada, Zona Franca of Barcelona. On the radio of Lluís Artigas’ patrol car there is a 10-50 sound: Someone has picked it up. The victim turns out to be a brutally murdered Nigerian girl following what turns out to be a voodoo ritual. Artigas, a burned agent suspected of being corrupt, will undertake an unexpected search for those responsible for this crime. On the night of Damballah, a magically written novel, with the narrative pulse of the classics of the genre, with the ironic tone and harsh, cynical sometimes, incisive always of the best narrators of the black novel, more in the street, Jordi Solé shows us a skimmed and fatty Barcelona for which they pulsate characters in which we do not always reparate, headed by a policeman, Lluís Artigas, called to become a mythical antihero, and confirms us as one of the most excellent voices in our narrative landscape.

Elena Maldonado, a renowned psychologist from the Salamanca district, gets a message in which someone says that she will murder one of her patients and that she will have to decide which and how she should die. He initially thinks it’s a heavy joke, but he will soon discover that his anonymous puppet knows all his secrets and that, if he doesn’t follow the rules of the game, his daughter will be in serious danger. The bad thing is that the cruelty of his besieger seems to be totally inhumane. Who is it and why does he hate it so much? Since when has he accompanied him? Is he sharing his day-to-day with a sadistic killer without knowing?

We all know that Rita Barberà was murdered. Just like the leader of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, and many other mysterious accidents and sudden deaths. Now, her murderer tells us in first person how he carried out the assignment immediately after the liquidation of the Valencian politic: nothing more and nothing less than killing a few writers and editors to try to save the already broken publishing industry. Will he achieve his goal, to explain the trade and get rid of all professional interferences? Sebastià Bennasar once again mixes blood and literature in a political literary thriller where everything is what it seems.

In 1982, with just three years, Samir was abandoned by her mother in the beach of El Saler. She covered his eyes and told him: «don’t move, I’ll be back in no time». But she never did. No one knew why she never came back, and that kid ended up living in a juvenile centre without identity and a bunch of memories. Samir grew up between orphans and disinherited of the world but determined to have an opportunity in life. Thirty years after her mother forgot him in that beach, Samir is no longer a defenceless kid but a captain of the Judicial Police of Valencia. Nevertheless, his past will come back mysteriously. A young women’s body was found murdered hours prior in the same place where he was abandoned when he was a kid, it will not seem to be a coincidence. The fact that she wore her name and phone number either. Captain Santos will start an investigation that will become a puzzle where the pieces of his past and his mother’s will end up being crucial to be able to learn the truth about the body. In the end, in the deepest part of himself, Samir has always long for that: that someday her mother came back to him.

Narrated with brilliantly an emotion, the suspense and the plot become in the best to read this book. The author builds the story taking turns between the past and the present in a fluid and rhythmic way, knowing that a novel not only requires a good story but also a powerful writing.