Psychology accounts for most of the success in the black genre. And the Toni Hill writer and part with the academic training in this regard. We may be approaching the murderer, the potential victim or the investigator, the question is to tune in to that dial of fear, of unease, of intrigue for the future of circumstances. Only when the characters are ourselves transmuted with skin, that effect of maximum tension is achieved in this type of novel. All this is applied to perfection by the great writers of thriller, mystery or horror, with Stephen King topping the ranking.
Toni Hill is an outstanding student in these struggles of introspection in the characters, in its naturalization within the plot to achieve that effect beyond the verisimilitude in the characterization: realism.
Intrigue is more of an inside-out effect than otherwise. The most disturbing starting scenario can deflate if the characters that inhabit it do not start with that force of the credible, that empathy that comes from the darkness of our drives facing the dark and sinister, the disturbing and unexpected.
Since the summer of dead toys came out, back in 2011, Toni Hill has been composing a bibliography of black genre that almost always falls on the shoulders of the inspector Hector Salgado, faced with homicides of all kinds that on many occasions weave their networks between the scenarios of power in which prosperity seems to justify everything.
But beyond the relentless and tormented Héctor Salgado, Hill also tackles independent novels charged with a similar tension, visiting new settings and plots with leaps in time and oscillations towards terror or mystery.
Toni Hill's Top 3 Recommended Books
Crystal Tigers
Homicide as hyperbole of guilt and remorse. The idea of evil presented in a way that anyone can empathize with to a greater degree. There are certain things in our past that can expose us to the idea of a great risk taken or something certainly wrong. And the idea of a mortal victim in the maelstrom of youth points to that essential mimicry with the human species.
If, in addition to an interesting proposal in this aspect of elemental attunement with guilt, a story is constructed that delves into the enigmas, secrets and mysteries of other times, revisited from the perspective of its connoisseurs long after, an interesting novel ends up being formed. which, woven together with the author's wise narrative tension, ends up leading us through an exciting reading.
In Tigres de cristal, a title with evocations of estrangement or dreamlike aspects, we meet two kids from the outskirts of Barcelona, where the city of Barcelona has been receiving immigrants from here and there since the 60s. Or rather, we know both of them characters who were those children, only three decades apart.
The passage of time, especially when that period supposes the abandonment of childhood and the consolidation in maturity, always brings a strange notion of life. What was left in childhood, what was done in those years seems like a distant dream evoked by details that are rescued as brilliant moments.
But what the two old schoolmates have to share is overshadowed by what they have to hide. If there is a moment stored in the memory of both, that is that winter night of 1978.
Death had a stellar role, unexpected, a cameo in the script of their lives that would end up marking them forever, no matter how hard they try to make a bad dream of it now.
Between the present and the 70s, we move through the streets of Cornellá, like a literary montage that superimposes a saturated light on old black and white photos. Only from the current light it also finds its shadow areas. Life is always a pending account and, for the protagonists of this story, it needs a final settlement.
The summer of the dead toys
The birth of a new black hero is always a time for celebration. In this novel we recover that taste for the police of the great Barcelona classics such as Vazquez Montalban o Gonzalez Ledesma.
It is clear that they have passed through the sieve of an up-to-date imaginary regarding the social reality of our days. The point is that the critical aspect with the spheres of power returns as the foundation to build a dark and obscuring plot on aspects of our reality presented with their disturbing nature.
Héctor Salgado finds himself in that sense of abandonment after the emotional earthquake of a separation. Perhaps the worst time to expose yourself to a case that can end up curling up like a deadly poison snake.
Because the death of a boy only points to a mere forensic closure but ends up pointing to something much more serious that is born from the ties of the young man's own family. Everything is getting rare, placing Salgado in the pillory.
And the good inspector cannot take a wrong step that can end it all. A story that perhaps does not provide great plot novelties and that, nevertheless, as an opera prima, discovered a powerful virtuosity in that psychological aspect of the great genre works.
Ice angels
And after delving into the life and work of Héctor Salgado for a whole trilogy, this novel arrived that made a clean slate. With a certain inspiration to Ruiz Zafon, the great storyteller of mystery also from Barcelona.
Because the Barcelona of 1916 is presented to us under a novel prism of this author with that evocation in transition between the last nineteenth-century brushstrokes and the awakening of a twentieth century that drew a Barcelona towards the most open modernism in a neutral Spain for the first Great War .
In this scenario suspended on the border of the atrocities of the European conflict, we meet Frederic Mayol, whose destiny guides him to the outskirts of Barcelona to work in a sanatorium where the mentally ill of yesteryear are confined.
The sanatorium itself looks like something out of a Tim Burton horror movie. And despite the courage of a Frederic who seems to feel liberated by visiting that peaceful place with views of the Mediterranean, little by little reality is generating the shadows of that space saturated with light. The beauty of the sanatorium seems inappropriate for that purpose in which they locked up that class of plague patients of the time who were the mentally ill.
But of course, precisely because of its dark legend, the building ended up assigned for that purpose. Investigating the history of the mansion, Frederic meets Blanca, a former student, and between them that strange magnetism is awakened between romantic love and restlessness due to the very nature of that girl who lived through the atrocious fire that occurred years ago in the place. Fundamentals that are intertwined to end up composing a plot in which its final twist takes our breath away.
Other recommended books by Toni Hill
the last executioner
Punishment beyond justice. The vile club that Spain still knew from 1820 to 1974. A madman nostalgic for those media between the Machiavellian and the insane.
Although it seems impossible, a serial killer is executing his victims with a vile club, the same instrument used by the executioners centuries ago and considered the cruelest killing machine ever built.
Why resort to such a macabre method? What do the dead have in common? Why do you choose special places in Barcelona to leave the bodies as if the city were an important part of your message?
When Dr. Lena Mayoral, a prestigious criminalist with a turbulent past, receives an urgent assignment to delve into the psychopath's mind, she cannot imagine how complicated the investigation will be or the dangers she will have to face. While the number of corpses increases, and under increasing media pressure, Lena will become obsessed with a murderer who, more and more, seems to be playing a game of life or death with her.
Hello, I just read THE LAST EXECUTIONER and I don't know when I was in limbo or I don't remember what happens to Thomas's character. I remember that his mother died and when he was at university his father died in an accident, but I haven't gotten anything clear about Tommy's career. I hope someone will clarify it for me.
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