Without the noise of other authors with greater international recognition, the Scottish Craig russell continues his literary career full of very interesting detective novels with historical foothills. In many of his novels, almost always starring him Commissioner Fabel or by Detective Lennox, this author is able to materialize that curious feedback between what he gathered from his interest in the history of Europe in the second half of the XNUMXth century with a narrative proposal around the intrigue.
Novels Capitalized by Fabel Tackle Substantial Criminal Cases and great tension while Lennox's investigations open up new possibilities around haunting mysteries of any kind.
And so, little by little Russell is reaching similar levels of success as those harvested in his native Scotland. Of course, winning the reader's favor in the first instance in a Germany enchanted with the prominence of Hamburg as Jan Fabel's destination city, but ending up splashing out on any other country based on that thematic balance in which Russell travels with fascinating naturalness.
In Russell we can enjoy a kind of mix between Camilla Lackberg y Lorenzo Silva, to name two greats from two very different origins. The first is clearly suspenseful and the second capable of incorporating many other aspects into its rich and varied plots.
So, introductions aside, let's go with my pick of Craig Russell's recommended novels.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Craig Russell
Lennox
The magical creative alternation between novels from the Fabel or Lennox series, emerged with this novel back in 2009. We moved to the great Scottish city of Glasgow, a kind of informal capital of this country that forms the United Kingdom.
It is the 50s and life in the city advances between its lights and shadows, with an underworld ruled in parallel by the underworld, a space in constant conflict between rival gangs that regularly splatters the city with blood.
And there is Lennox, whose particular paths have led him to work as an investigator in a city where crime tiptoes too many times for justice. Lennox has a lot of work to do and his back is wide enough to sleep soundly to knock anyone down.
In his new investigation into the death of Frankie McGahern, his own client, Frankie's heirloom, will also end up being assassinated, immediately targeting someone powerful in need of the necessary silence to further advance his plan.
But even the most powerful mobsters in the area seem puzzled by the case when Lennox investigates the crimes. And that's when a higher power will appear to plunge everything into an all-out fight.
Death in Hamburg
Russell's first novel transformed Hamburg's Germanic city-state into a new London in which the police investigation evokes great plots of suspense filled with a hard-boiled point that coexist in perfect collusion with what may be the worst crimes.
Because the harshness with which the two female victims appear initially point to some psychopath with anatomical knowledge. And of course, the simple murderers do not stop to recreate with the monstrous detail with which the antagonist of this story intervenes.
Marked as the only clue as "son of Sven", Detective Jan Fabel must begin to put the puzzle together from remote pieces, before new victims appear again.
The question is to put oneself in the shoes of the wicked mind capable of such theatricality of death and that signature that points to the mythological.
Fear of dark waters
As we got to know the implacable Fabel, he was facing the most diverse cases. And this case is one of the most disturbing.
We continue in Hamburg, a city rediscovered in its most sinister aspect thanks to Russell. There is no better time to show off the thirsty criminal for his particular glory than the days when a city like Hamburg hosts a summit of global relevance.
Experts from half the world meet in the city-state to address the best procedure to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Those who govern the city hope that those days will serve to give prestige to their city and nothing worse than a crime to give a loudspeaker to the worst of their society. Jan Fabel is in charge of trying to solve a cruel murder by beheading, which appeared as a sinister hangover after copious rains.
Only, from the decapitated body, Fabel is reaching the foothills of a dangerous sect that takes advantage of the strange evolution of the weather for its most ominous preaching about the end of the world.
Convinced of the underground interests that drive this sect, Fabel will try to definitively link the crime with them, but the threads of the organization move from very distant and inaccessible settings, as well as extremely dangerous.
Other recommended books by Craig Russell
devil's paradise
The Hollywood of the 20s will no longer be the same in the common imagination since the movie "Babylon." A delirium that no one suspected for that first cinema with voice and overacting on both sides of the screen. On this occasion we also added some dark tints to make the nascent mecca of cinema an inhospitable place where the artistic intention of cinema seeks the greatest reflection with the underworlds of the most evil reality...
A dark, gripping thriller set in 1920s Hollywood about "the greatest horror film ever made," the curse that is said to surround it, and a deadly search decades later for the only copy rumored to exist. still exists.
1927: Hollywood studio repairman Mary Rourke is called to the palatial home of "the most desirable woman in the world," silent film actress Norma Carlton, star of The Devil's Playground. When Rourke finds Carlton dead, she wonders if the dark rumors she's heard are true: that The Devil's Playground really is a cursed production. But nothing in Hollywood is what it seems, and cynical fixer Rourke, more accustomed to hiding the truth from studio bosses, finds herself searching for it.
1967: Paul Conway, film historian and ardent fan of silent films, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumor: that there may be only one copy of The Devil's Playground, a Holy Grail for film buffs that was supposedly cursed and lost in time. . His search for him takes him deep into the Mojave Desert, to an isolated hotel that hasn't changed in forty years but houses a single occupant and a shocking secret.
Separated by decades, both Rourke and Conway begin to suspect that the real Devil's Paradise is, in fact, Hollywood itself.
