There is no doubt that the Spanish noir genre is being approached from all sides by good writers such as Dolores Redondo or María Oruña herself.
In the case of María, in whose pen I have sometimes found a certain harmony in her characters with Victor of the Tree (Today is the thing of comparisons), his new novel Where We Were Invincible delves into the paranormal as a telluric space that takes root in old spaces, inviting us to think or anticipate that an old and lustrous house can still be inhabited by ancestral presences.
We travel to Suances. The sudden death of a gardener at the Palace of the Master, while carrying out his maintenance tasks, seems to be associated with the simple fatality of an untimely death caused by heart failure.
The very seasonal setting of a summer that remits in favor of the melancholy of autumn seems one more argument towards that intention to transform reality into a telluric whim, in a call from the earth, in an evocation of the old house, in a first evening chill of sunset that seeks the new bosom of late summer.
The first and biggest surprised by the tragic event is the own occupant of the house. The writer Carlos Green, fully recognized in his trade there in America, although originally from the cradle of that old house, does not give credit for the death of the gardener. Affected and contrite, he tells Lieutenant Valentina Redondo that a certain omen had been approaching him lately. Except that being a man of letters, it is understood that the imagination can end up overflowing on certain occasions.
For an empirical person like Valentina, the sensations that Carlos Green has transmitted to him sound like the delirium of a Poe locked in his cell and writing nonstop delirious and dark stories.
And yet there is always a moment to begin to believe in something more than what the eyes guess and complete the rest of the senses. Because despite the fact that the gardener has died only because his heart stopped beating, some strange traces reveal a contact prior to the end of his life ...
Valentina and her team of technicians; Oliver his partner and Carlos Green; even the inhabitants of Suances, especially some of them. Among all these characters a current from the past moves, an ancestral secret, a gloomy whisper of the wind between the branches that seems to reach the reader's ear ...
You can now buy the novel Where we were invincible, the new book by María Oruña, here: