There are professions that always have something of a special vocation. It's like that of the child who voluntarily went to the goal at recess to be the goalkeeper...
And of course, a child who chooses to be a doorman can end up working as a policeman or doctor and finally finding in the writer's trade that place where he can tell the world his special way of seeing things that, precisely because of that novel prism, always ends up hooking readers. .
I remember right now another illustrious police writer as Victor of the Tree (It's not the only one). And today we make room for Pere Cervantes, another policeman (perhaps not a goalkeeper as a child but also a Catalan like Víctor del Arbol).
In Pere's already considerable bibliography we find a commendable taste for a variety surely derived from creative prospecting that seems to be focusing on the detective genre. A noir between Catalonia and the Balearic Islands that includes a start to a series of novels. But Cervantes's pen can address more existential plots in fiction; or even non-fiction books with a clear informative connotation from his police performance.
Top 3 recommended books by Pere Cervantes
the crystal spy
Wars never completely end. After the embers of the last fires comes the chill. Because the cold war as a concept can be extended to any conflict that ends up spreading sine die like an old ghost between memories and ideologies. In that misty space this story moves, disturbing in its latent violence, contained and unleashed like fleeting lightning bolts of hatred and animosity.
Taibe Shala is not just another victim of the last war in the Balkans, she is a woman with a frozen soul. A journalist and interpreter for the United Nations. A mother made of silences. A spy. This story begins with her strange disappearance in Pristina, her hometown, in 2019.
Manu Pancorbo, alias Panco, an old flame from Taibe and a Spanish war reporter, will embark on his personal odyssey to find out the reasons for the disappearance of the woman he has not been able to forget. He will be accompanied by his loyal colleague in armed conflicts, Olga Balcells, a photographer who accumulates international recognition and ghosts from which she cannot free herself.
The investigations of the two journalists in the new Kosovo will take them to a dark world of personal vendettas, intelligence agencies, suspense and betrayals. Returning to the Balkans twenty years later will open wounds in Panco that he thought had been healed, and it will be by diving into the episodes of the recent past that he will discover who Taibe Shala is and the secrets that forged the enigmatic woman who marked him forever and who never came to be. know at all.
The boy with the bobbins
When I find a story about childhood randomly peeking into the depths of crime, I always remember that movie about Harrison Ford and the Amish boy who sees crime in a gas station bathroom, I think I remember.
The point is that the idea always cultivates that crudeness of what it should never be, precisely of the necessary protection of children from the worst of the world that we adults strive to build. Pere Cervantes builds a similar scenario around Nil Roig, a boy who already lives the hard and eternal days of the dictatorship in Barcelona. On that bad day in 1945, while returning home from his "job" as a film reel carrier, he encountered murder.
On the one hand the unfathomable fear in the mind of a 13-year-old child, on the other the challenge that awakens with the particular legacy of the victim. Because that deceased had time, before his expiration, to give him a mysterious picture, precisely of a movie actor. There were no instructions about it, just the certainty that the discovery of great secrets was traced from that image.
Hits
Faced with a world that ended up trapping him. In that strange border where evildoers, heroes, villains and idols of survival are held, we find an Alpha who has just been released from prison.
Being a policeman, getting out of jail is for him an invitation to complete surrender, to the easy destruction of the shadows already known. Under the nickname of Alpha we approach one of those lives made into a novel, with its point of adaptation to fiction but without ever knowing if by excess or by default. At the time of the drastic decision to undoubtedly put himself on the other side, Alfa will be able to exonerate himself on a thousand pretexts, justify himself by a new life after the jail in which he is not found.
The point is that he no longer feels that he has any roots with the good side and decides that the intense claims of the underworld, like siren songs, are inalienable invitations to a freedom that, yes, seen only from the side of perdition, is so bright as blinding.
Other recommended books by Pere Cervantes…
They don't let us be children
The beginning of a series, the creation of essential characters in every crime novel narrator, no matter how direct or indirect their creative foray into the genre.
María Médem is a very intense protagonist from aspects rarely addressed in noir. Because she is a new mother, she is the owner and mistress of a house in which her partner can barely stay for work reasons and where in return her mother-in-law moves like a fish in water. For her, of course, the most important thing was a job that awaited her with the news of a double crime involving two elderly women that she was assigned to along with her most uncomfortable partner, Roberto Rial.
The perfect cyclogenesis so that he approaches the life of María Médem with dark omens of a thriller. A surprising novel that brings a singular sensitivity to the feminine in a police environment that can still remain unfavorable, that puzzles in the personal relationships interwoven between the protagonists and that hatches an unexpected resolution around the central crimes of the police case.
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