The Strange Summer of Tom Harvey, by Mikel Santiago

The heavy thought that you have failed someone can be chilling in light of the fateful subsequent events. You may not be entirely guilty that everything went so fucking wrong, but your omission proved fatal.

That is the perspective that surrounds the reader of this novel as soon as it begins with the first pages. A kind of indirect guilt, which could have been avoided if Tom had reached out to Bob Ardlan, his ex-father-in-law. Because shortly after that call Bob ended up slamming himself on the ground from the balcony of his house.

But of course, Tom was flirting with a spectacular girl, or at least he was trying, and serving an ex-father in those circumstances was still embarrassing.

When I started reading this novel, I remembered the last works of Luca D'andrea, sandrone dazieri or Andrea Camilleri. And i thought this book «The strange summer of Tom Harvey», by the mere fact of being developed in Italy, it was going to form a hodgepodge of these three authors of the same genre.

Damn prejudices! Soon I understood that Mikel's is what a voice of its own and differentiated usually says. Although the black genre always offers shared winks, what Mikel achieves is a beautiful black literature, to call it somehow.

There is murder, there is conflict (inside and outside the character), there is investigation and mystery, but somehow, the way Mikel's characters move through their well-linked plot conveys a special beauty in an agile and precise verb that he knows how to fill in descriptions from the inside of the character to the outside and from the outside to the inside. A kind of scene-character symbiosis that you may not have found in other authors. I do not know if I explain myself. What I am clear about is that, when in doubt, you cannot stop reading it.

You can now buy the book "The Strange Case of Tom Harvey", the latest novel by Mikel Santiago, here: