Economic prosperity tends to hide, under the warm cloak of its natural cycle, the worst of the human condition: ambition.
And it is that in that frenzy of money that circulates wildly when they paint glasses, that ambition that in the abstract could be considered as a licit economic drive, ends up awakening monsters, like Goya's dream of reason.
Spain in 2004 was that country that still believed in the impossible inertia that guides the invisible hand of Adam Smith, only that this hand, as in games of chance, ends up dragging everything to the bank (understand banking, rich, powerful and other elites guided by ambition).
In that economy turned into a game, cheating was the order of the day, corruption rode with the acquiescence of short-term politicians (there are no other kinds), who only understand that if today works well, the immediate tomorrow will have more votes.
A perfect setting for Carme Riera present us the plot of this novel, in tune with that other novel of his, Almost Still Life. Agent Rosario Hurtado gives the witness on this occasion to Helena Martínez, a private detective who must find out what happened to a Catalan businessman.
The search for Helena ends up becoming an easily recognizable scenario of our most recent past, the one that caused our current situation before the change in the economic paradigm in which we still do not know what horizons await us.
And it is that the plot moves to two waters, between the thriller and social criticism, like a kind of eighties crime novel, in the style of Gonzalez Ledesma, an intention that was well needed in this genre to recover that idea of a crime novel whose darkness hangs over very close social and political realities. What is darker than the corruption and falsehood of so many characters that we see circulating on the news? Eloquent politicians who end up discovering themselves as first-rate thieves who end up escaping from justice under the protection of the prescription of crimes ...
Thus, a novel with great black novel taste and that comes to entertain and chronicle our times. A brilliant novel with great doses of irony to see what moves in the high spheres of power.
You can now buy the novel I will avenge your death, the new book by Carme Riera, here: