Already pointing to a new benchmark of the black gender in Spain, Antonio Mercero, however, cultivates a distorting novel of any kind of noir of our days. Because it is true that the author likes the service that these types of novels provide for the stripping of social miseries of all kinds. Also discovered as the real identity of carmen mola, shared with Jorge DÃaz y Agustin Martinez, the projection of this author takes on a new dimension.
In his personal work we discover a certain transgressive and vindictive intentionality that goes beyond the plot and its suspense drifts. Aspects that can mark another advance in parallel, more connected with our sins on the other side of fiction.
So if you are looking for the typical noir, at times more inclined towards thriller or more aimed towards the strictly police, you will find in Mercero's novels a grip on the guidelines and nods to the genre that is fully satisfactory. The point is that you immerse yourself in aspects with more meaning of our reality that may divert you from the plot, because nothing is free in this life, but that end up making up that whole with greater emotional implications in the end...
Top 3 recommended novels by Antonio Mercero
High tide
There are strange times in which digital is already a world that occupies us in a greater percentage than the land we walk on. And if our world already gave too much of itself for evil to lurk from so many shadows and dead spots of reality, what awaits us in the intangible of IPs is as overwhelming as it is frightening.
Every Thursday the Müller sisters tell their lives to millions of followers on the YouTube channel High tidebut in this week's video they appear gagged and bound, in a dark place, and crying desperately. The views grow for hours without anyone knowing if it is serious or is a macabre joke.
The parents denounce the disappearance and the case is assigned to a strange pair of investigators: DarÃo Mur, divorced and in love with classical literature, and Nieves González, addicted to dating online and victim of harassment at the police station. When the death of Martina Müller is broadcast live, DarÃo will face the world of influencers, to which her own daughter is addicted and that has turned her into a violent and conflictive girl.
The case of the dead Japanese women
When Mercero presented his debut work, as far as a crime novel is concerned, titled "The End of Man", we discovered an author who seemed to briefly visit a detective genre to which he contributed a ground-breaking perspective. His was a novel that balanced its weight between the crime of the case at hand, counterbalanced with a story about sexual freedom and prejudice, all embodied in an unforgettable police officer.
The point is that, be that as it may, Antonio Mercero was not passing through. And with this novel he confirms his intention to sit at the table of the great narrators of the black genre in Spain, who on the other hand, already share a large number of current great diners such as Lorenzo Silva, Javier Castillo o Dolores Redondo, among some others.
There is room for everyone. And if they do not have to squeeze the ass. Even more so for a guy like Mercero endowed with imagination and arrests to always look for risky plots and in the end extremely enjoyable to read. If the police SofÃa Luna, formerly known as Carlos Luna, joins the plethora of protagonists of Spanish crime novels, it will mean a great advance in the necessary iconoclasm also for the popular imaginary brought from fiction.
Of course, to do this Luna will have to defend her worth. And in this second novel, with her sex reassignment already materialized, we discover that, indeed, SofÃa is here to catch readers demanding the saga.
In Madrid there are a series of murders of Japanese women. The nexus between the victims or rather the motive that unites them in fatality points to some kind of asexual psychopathy of a mind convinced by its own revenge of a perverse world.
SofÃa's own sexual condition seems more like a drag that reveals prejudices and that places her in a muddy terrain in which her work is complicated at times. When the daughter of the Japanese ambassador disappears, the matter acquires unsuspected political, social and media overtones. And to top it all, SofÃa faces family issues that she could never have imagined ...
The end of man
This is not the first novel to present the idea of ​​the end of the male sex in humanity. The idea seems to be taking on a sinister literary appeal in recent literature. A recent novel by Naomi Alderman pointed to this end of man, materialized by evolution itself.
Although there is no need to worry, it is just a strange idea that has arisen when I came across these two current novels that address that finalist idea from one level or another. Because the truth is that in book The end of man, by Antonio Mercero, the approach is only a metaphor, a hyperbole to open us to very fashionable approaches today about sexual freedom extended to all areas, including identity as a person.
Carlos Luna, police officer, knows that one day it had to happen. His internal identity is different, and the change from him to SofÃa Luna had materialized in his mind years ago. Despite the arduous task of social awareness, it is never easy to expose your reality when it differs from the average, even more so depending on circles, places or professions. But Carlos does it. One day he leaves his house to work with his wig, ready to face anything.
Fate then offers him an unexpected respite. When he arrives at the police station, at his homicide squad, everyone is upset with the recent murder of a young man, the son of a well-known writer.
A unique literary cocktail in which we move forward trapped by both sides of the story, the investigation of the case of the dead young man and the adaptation of SofÃa to her new status, a unique space in which she will have to live, even with her partner and Ex-lover, as she weathers her transition from fatherhood to motherhood of an adolescent boy, as confused or more than she is.
The approach of this story is certainly unusual, although in the background there is something that unites this detective novel with many others of its kind, that dark side of the investigator, that aspect of detachment from the world that surrounds him, that feeling of exhaustion ..., undoubtedly a link with the most purist of the genre so that the contrast is softened a bit.
