Being a policeman and ending up writing novels seems to be something naturalized in a considerable number of authors who are already the first swords of Spanish literature. Narrators of the dark side of the world ranging from Victor of the Tree but also Stephen Navarro, to Peter Cervantes o Louis Stephen And some others.
The point is that if someone is lacking in inspiration, precisely that dark side of the world (which all of them knew or still know in police performance), they provide diverse arguments that arise from the feelings of risk in their own flesh to the simple observation of those who they stand in the shadows.
Placebo, need, conviction, who knows if a point of atonement ... Literature in these cases ends up being born or simply slides from an innate creative imprint expanded in that disturbing and contrasts-laden space of patrol nights.
Be that as it may, welcome are these types of authors. In the case of Esteban Navarro, fully devoted to his creativity unleashed in a prolific production. A black bibliography grown with that quality wedge provided by word of mouth growth, the awakening from indie markets such as self-publishing in Amazon as a lever to reach more and more levels of success by interspersing independent editions and leading publishers.
Top 3 recommended novels by Esteban Navarro
The blackout
Who else who least pulls from places composed from a particular imaginary that is tremendously useful to reflect common places, real spaces transformed to necessity. From Stephen King with Castle Rock or others up Gabo with Macondo.
On this occasion, Esteban Navarro places us in a lost town subjected to some strange effect between the magnetic and the telluric that has everyone between scared, fascinated, bewildered and terrified. Darkness has always been a meeting place for evil. In the thick blackness of a world without light, demons colonize our world and, who else who least ends up succumbing to the sinister claims ...
In a small town in northern Spain, the electricity has mysteriously stopped working. Batteries, batteries, mobile phones, vehicles or machinery of any kind are no longer useful.The government sends several agents who have to investigate the murder of the owner of one of the town's bars, the rape of a girl and the suicide of the parish priest of the hermitage. Apparently all those deaths are related to the blackout.
Executioners
In the judicial thrillers type John GrishamNothing was more unsettling and at the same time intense than the idea of a false culprit paying for someone else's crime. The social ignominy, the stigma, the fear, the stolen life, even the finalist execution of other dark days of Justice ... all those feelings are always hard to bear when you empathize with this type of fictional characters (I do not tell you when something this is actually the case).
In 1952, the sisters Encarnación and Matilde Silva Montero were assassinated inside the tobacconist they ran in the city of Seville. The police did not take long to arrest the three perpetrators: Juan Vázquez, Antonio Pérez and Francisco Castro, being sentenced to death by vile stick. The executioner, Bernardo Sánchez Bascuñana, coincides a few weeks after the execution with a friend of his, a retired civil guard, and tells him a terrible truth: the accused were innocent. The Civil Guard decides to initiate an investigation on his own to find the true culprits of the double crime.
Rock island
Every change in the register of an author has that point of probing, of reinventing himself, of launching into the exploration of the deepest substrates of the imagination in search of new scenarios that, in the first instance, also satisfy the creator faced with new scenarios.
This novel is one of those oddities that baffle some readers and fascinate others. Because we no longer look at the policeman but at the mystery that frightens the terror. A morbid look at some poor survivors whose apparent fate seems more like a destiny that looks out into the abyss of unknown forces ... A plane suffers an accident in an undetermined place on the Indonesian coast. The only four survivors take shelter on a small desert island, until rescue teams arrive.
While they wait, strange events begin to occur that make the castaways suspect that they are not alone and that there is someone else there, apart from them. Everything gets complicated when they decide to take refuge in a damaged ship that has been stranded on the reef and a kind of giant walrus prevents anyone from approaching it.
The reasons why I left the Police:
https://youtu.be/1URpufBCx4M
The story is a little different. Pere Cervantes and Luis Esteban are real policemen, with professional records of a thousand pairs of balls, of which they can tell their own stories and with knowledge of the facts. The main proof is that they do not give the bar anything at all. You will never know all their merits, mostly because they don't need to brag, and also because they don't mix one thing with the other, although they could. It is ashamed that you put them in the same bag as Esteban Navarro.
Esteban Navarro is an ass. A savvy man who has practically not touched the street, who has spent his professional life stationed in town police stations, guarding the DNI parking lots, inventing that he fights against crime and looking for controversial moves so as not to look like the sad civil servant he has been, becoming the victim to sell more. I mean to sell something, because if no publisher wants it, it will be for something. Wait, I know: because publishers don't want good literature and because man never set foot on the moon. Pere Cervantes or Luis Esteban risk their skin, like 90% of the police, and like 90% of the police, nobody has seen them complain or go around riding trash chickens. Difference with Esteban Navarro, who gave him a file for a minor offense and sought his life to take early retirement "because he was depressed." A super hero.
And you will tell me what is that of the leading publishers. This one was caught by Ediciones B when it caught other self-published Kindle, to see if the invention worked, and their ship sank in the first week. If not, the guy would still be there and no one in the air would be able to bear it. If this trilero is the representation of the Spanish crime novel, Leticia Sabater is the standard-bearer of high European literature.
The reasons why I left the Police:
https://youtu.be/1URpufBCx4M