For some time now, Spanish noir literature has been led by female narrators. Great writers also backed by a resounding international success. Quote veterans like Alicia Gimenez Bartlett or to consolidated irruptions such as Dolores Redondo they are already big words.
In the case of Ilaria Tutti we find an interesting feminine referent of the Negro gender in an Italy that has undoubtedly observed the Spanish example with the clarity of the necessary mirror. Because beyond sexes, these authors narrate about the darkness of the world with the validity of a generational changeover of other great feathers that used to be almost always male in these parts. From Vazquez Montalban a Camilleri, on both sides of the Mediterranean, would applaud this necessary readaptation of the fatal woman as a label for writers capable of giving us the creeps with their plots and twists.
Iralia Tuti is a newcomer, right. But her powerful imaginary had already been taking a run and her trilogy is already closed around the leading role of a Teresa Battaglia who seems mythical due to the researcher's own workings and due to a plot drift that points to disturbing twists ...
Top recommended novels by Ilaria Tuti
Daughter of ashes
The mind of the murderer available to the police. Something like that Hannibal that we all remember, the one who made himself available to Clarice, the police forensic psychiatrist so that she could listen to the whisper of the lambs... Only this time even evil is scared of his responses. Because there are always imitators, sinister murderers who surpass their masters until they become simple slaughterers.
A serial killer, arrested by Commissioner Battaglia twenty-seven years ago, manages to escape from the high security unit of the prison in which he is imprisoned. However, after ten days on the run, he turns himself in to the police again because he fears being the target of another dangerous criminal who wants to reproduce the old and macabre scenarios of his murders. To reveal new details about his crimes and information about his mysterious impersonator, he is only willing to talk to Teresa Battaglia.
Teresa must interpret the enigmatic clues that he leaves behind him: refined mosaic pieces that he builds with pieces of human bones, while trying to reconnect with the person he was almost three decades ago, that brilliant woman, trapped in a turbulent relationship. conjugal partner, who became a pioneer hunter of serial killers and the first criminal profiler of the Italian police.
Flowers over hell
The bucolic becomes something sinister. The mountain and its environment is life, oxygen, but its forests harbor atavistic legends and dark fears about the wild. The human being can return to his most beastly side to sow evil. And nothing better than an environment of exuberant nature to delve into that mixture of the sinister and the ancestral.
Dolores Redondo Perhaps he would open paths of the noir genre among the woods with his Baztán trilogy exported all over the world. And now it is Ilaria Tuti, from Italy, who returns to offer a thriller of great natural spaces with absolute female protagonism.
Because Teresa Battaglia, the one in charge of investigating some deaths and the disappearance of a baby, patrimonializes much of the narrative tension. Her search for answers to stop the criminal is completed by sad memories and guilt that haunt her from the very shadows of her being, turned into a lush forest in which she is losing more and more.
Massimo Marini is that necessary assistant who can support the protagonist in her worst moments of disorientation. Because the case seems tailor-made to unbalance her. The events conspire to open the gates of a hell made of forest and mountains in which a perennial echo reverberates that shows madness and evil; and that he faces the toughest struggle from Teresa's internal forum and towards that dark certainty that evil, hell, is all one.
Black virgin
With two novels to her credit, the Italian Ilaria Tutti is one of those authors in crescendo but pending absolute confirmation. Because then cases like those of Paula hawkins that end up stagnating with no signs of a solution after having known the most famous successes. Become a Joel dicker or staying in the one or two hit wonder is just a matter of slightly lowering the bar of self-demand in the face of editorial pressures that urge news ...
But of course, in the case of Tuti, the awards confirm that good work beyond the commercial coup. And it is that if in a takeoff like the one of "Flowers on hell" it is surpassed in advance by a glorious Edgar 2021 finalist like this, we can imagine everything that can come ...
The curator Teresa Battaglia doubts whether to continue hiding from her team the disease that is affecting her memory, when she receives a call from an art gallery: a portrait of enormous value has been found attributed to a cult painter, Alessio Andrian, whose eleventh and last work was believed lost.
The painting, however, has a detail that overshadows the discovery: the red paint that draws the face of a young woman is actually human blood and, according to the chromatic analysis, the artist's brush was soaked in a heart that was still beating.
Teresa and her team have to find out what happened in 1945, the year the painting was painted, when the author was hiding in the woods near the border between Italy and Yugoslavia fleeing from the Nazis. Battaglia, with increasingly fragile health, must rely on the help of her collaborator Massimo Marini, but soon she will realize that she is not the only one hiding an unspeakable secret.
