There is always a story, a plot that marks that before and after. At least in an emblematic case of a writer with quality and tenacity like Lorraine Franco. And many are those who consider that "Silvia Blanch's Last Summer" It is that inflection that blatantly marks upward, pointing to resounding success. And that Lorena makes her literary career compatible, for more and no less merit, with her performance as an actress and model.
Focusing on the novel, and approaching specifically a town around the forest to discover a suspense novel, a thriller with that almost telluric composition, brings us closer to narrative spaces masterfully approached by Dolores Redondo in Baztán.
But the truth is that a paradigmatic space of fear such as a forest is always a perfect place to awaken that atavistic and ancestral terror, that panic that can awaken like an icy spasm amid the whispering silence of the forest. Either by a simple sensation or by the call of some beast that approaches from the shadows.
This is where Silvia Blanch disappeared, between the jaws of a forest that, because it is a Mediterranean wooded space in the depths of the province of Barcelona, does not become friendlier and less gloomy than Baztán.
As readers we discover the town of Montseny in two stages. First when the tragedy took hold of the routine of the place and second when some year later the journalist Alex proceeds to investigate the matter of a disappearance as shocking as that of the young woman. Everything to recreate a newspaper article. Only that sometimes the will to know more can bring us closer to areas of reality that are too dark ...
Perhaps in this move between two times, that of the events and that of Alex's arrival, we can know or intuit more than Alex herself about the dark motives for the disappearance that points to even the most heinous crime.
But that is the least because the author is in charge of channeling all the emotional intensity to how Alex faces his investigation, and what he will have to live and suffer in an increasingly threatening place.
In that strange anxiety that assails noble souls, when they feel as close to the truth as they are to death, Alex will not be able to give up discovering everything, because he has become too involved. Because in the interviews and walks around the places he meets someone very special, perhaps the one who can be blamed the most for Silvia's disappearance.
But there are moments when what we want most is to discover that reality can end up shaking everything, even our worst suspicions, even the most obvious lies. Only to end up reconciling us with life, with love and with death.
You can now buy the novel The Last Summer of Silvia Blanch, by Lorena Franco, here: