Let's start from the background of this novel. And it is that the tormented characters always tune in with that part of the reader that links them to their own past; with the errors or traumas that to a greater or lesser extent seem to intensely mark the fate of existence. Above good decisions and successful consequences.
In the end, everything is limited to the feeling of the peremptory, of the only opportunity to make decisions. Something that ultimately generates that existential weight of limited time.
It may sound too far-reaching to talk about the prequel to the triumphant Baztán saga de Dolores Redondo, that work that served to popularize the black genre with greater intensity if possible in Spain.
But it is that the character of Amaia Salazar left so many loose ends personally, so much juice on his childhood and youth dotted by the most disruptive events in the existential, that a return to the saga from the origins pointed without a doubt to all those looming shadows about the brilliant inspector.
We are located in 2005 and we soon recognize Aloisius Dupree, a researcher with whom Amaia contacted on occasion in the initial trilogy. He is in charge of conducting a meeting of police forces from around the world under the umbrella of the FBI in the city of Quantico, where the training department of this American body is based.
Amaia stands out greatly during the instruction and is included in the investigation of a real case. Its special connection with the modus operandi of criminal minds (which we could already guess in the trilogy) is manifested again here.
But her initiatory professional journey that immerses her fully in the case of the criminal known as "the composer" (for the most gruesome reasons we can imagine) is turned upside down when an imperative need demands her from her original Elizondo.
But Amaia is already embarked (never better said for a New Orleans practically submerged under the waters after the passage of that Hurricane Katrina), and leaves her most personal reality parked, suspended, stopped. The figure of her father moves her between contradictory feelings of defeat and residual love. Because it was he, Juan Salazar, who did not know how to save her from her deepest fears that have lasted until today.
Although it is true that Amaia and her traumas have an insurmountable destiny, I don't know. And that connects her especially to Dupree, her head of research in the United States. Because he, too, has gone through its particular hells, more gruesome if possible, in the American way where everything always seems bigger.
The plot advances with several open fronts, from the now remote Elizondo to a ghostly city like New Orleans, dark and suffocating between the total sinister of Katrina and its esoteric heritage.
Because beyond the murderer nicknamed as the composer, the hecatomb of the hurricane seems to remove everything until it reaches the crossed existences of Amaia and Dupree. Without the composer really being considered as a supporting actor, new issues from the past emerge from the rising waters, like nightmares that the great hurricane has been in charge of recovering to unhinge the reader in a constant change of frantic scenarios.
The Story of Man is the story of his fears anywhere in the world, Dupree assures him in some of the scenes in this novel, confirming it at the precise moment in which the plot equates Elizondo and New Orleans.
Shadow characters, witchcraft, voodoo, natural disasters. A narrative proposal that advances under the symphony of a sinister violin capable of evoking so many pending issues on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The ecstasy of the crime novel is looming like a horizon that prevents you from stopping reading.
A total noir novel, with flashes of terror even that brings us even closer to that great character who is already Amaia Salazar. She is now only 25 years old but she already draws that determination of the inspector that she will become. Except that the shadow generated from the deep forests of her heart, like a telluric force that links her to Baztán, continues to awaken the same chills of chill of those who try to escape from fears. And curiously, in that fear lies his extraordinary capacity for investigation. Because she is the needle in the haystack ...
You can now buy the novel The North Face of the Heart, the novel by Dolores Redondo, here: