Journalist Carme Chaparro broke out as a novelist last year with I'm not a monster, a novel of marked suspense, of maximum tension in so far as it comprises the mixture of everyday life with the impulse of the most ancient fear. With this book, he won the Primavera de Novela 2017 award.
Its protagonist Ana Arén returns from her previous award-winning novel to face again with that fear that ends up transferring from the investigation to the private sphere of the inspector herself.
Because once again Ana Arén will have everything against it: the nature and sophistication of the crime, its threatening work environment, the inexhaustible voice of public opinion multiplied its volume with inexhaustible sources of early conviction and recrimination of the investigation itself.
Because the victim is not just anybody. And when a homicide ends up splashing the popular imagination in which the emblematic figures, the powerful, the great men and women who make up that mirror in which everyone seek to reflect, reside, the matter acquires the epic of the sinister.
The murderer chose her, the charismatic and renowned woman. Perhaps an act of misogyny, perhaps a fan effect taken to the extreme of unhealthy obsession, without ruling out its closest environment, one in which surprises are always discovered.
But this time the premeditation reaches inscrutable levels. A crime always denotes a passion factor, a hatred, a concentrated chemistry towards the destruction of life. And yet the psychopath's reason can lead everything back with the necessary coldness. Because in the end it will be worth it. Once hatred finds its channel of expression, when its power and strength are unleashed on the body of the idol to be overthrown, everything will have been worth it ...
And the worst of all is that surely Ana Arén is not in her best moment to face this new sample of evil as a desire for macabre glory in front of a people who watch in dismay the end of one of their great stars.
The virtue of the writer of suspense novels, of the dark thriller that triumphs in the present, is his ability to expose the characters until that moment in which the most malleable reason seems to reach its maximum elasticity. Despair and even madness loom sinister on the horizon. It is then that only the great surviving characters like Ana Arén can end up clinging to one last thread.
You can now buy the novel The Chemistry of Hate, the new book of Carme Chaparro, with a discount for access from this blog, here: