La French crime novel quarry live one of its best moments. With the recent recognition of Fred Vargas as Princess of Asturias of letters, or with the prominent role that other good authors of the genre are acquiring such as Franck thilliez or own Bernard minier (on whose work I will now expand), it seems as if the focus of the genre is gradually shifting from the Nordic countries to the heart of continental Europe.
But the truth is that France has always been a source of detective novels with that marked dark tinge. Hence, the very gabacho term "noir" is also commonly used to refer to these criminal stories whose roots are embedded in every social stratum.
In the case of Bernard Minier, it can be said that he managed to reach out and convince with his debut film "Under the ice", which won the Polar prize for the best French crime novel. Getting a recognition of this entity, at first, speaks more than good of an author, because the pools of many literature contests also have that crime novel point in which the name of the possible winners is known before to open the escrows ... And betting on a novice does not usually happen, unless the work overflows with quality.
So Bernard Minier was able to win over a renowned jury and soon also French and European readers. And since then several more novels have arrived that achieved a similar impact and the feeling that the crime novel writer who was Minier was not due to the coincidence of a single inspired work.
top 3 recommended books by Bernard Minier
Lucia
Salamanca has its former as the epicenter of disturbing plots. Either in a cinematographic aspect (even at the Hollywood level) or in a literary presentation. And it is that the monumental beauty of the city also offers those dark spaces between the cold stone. Shadows similar to those of the soul when it loses its horizon and surrenders to the most unexpected hostility. This time it's up to Bernard Minier to transform the city to everyone's surprise.
Salamanca, autumn 2019. Through a powerful computer program that allows data from various police forces to be crossed, six university students supervised by the Criminology professor Salomón Borges have just discovered the existence of a mysterious murderer, hidden for three decades, whose modus operandi consists of staging Renaissance compositions gluing the bodies of their victims.
At the same time, the young lieutenant LucÃa Guerrero, a member of the elitist Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard, has just discovered her partner crucified and glued to a hill on the outskirts of Madrid. An unusual and atrocious crime that will lead her to meet Salomón Borges and travel the Spanish geography with him, from the streets of Salamanca to Segovia and the Pyrenees of Huesca, in search of the abominable murderer.
With Salamanca and the Spain of today as a backdrop, Bernard Minier offers us a thriller where all the characters will face their own destiny, their deepest terrors and a much more disturbing truth than any mythological story.
Hermanas
There is something of an eerie proximity between the love, the brotherly, and the ominous and gruesome. The poles attract in minds capable of the worst until they completely overlap. On this occasion, fiction reminds us, with that vague echo of a reality that sometimes surpasses it. Only that we also delve into those demons that assail us later, when we try to draw a thick veil, especially so that memory does not torment us...
May 1993. Tied to tree trunks and dressed for their first communion, Amber and Alice Oesterman are found dead on the banks of the Garonne. Thus begins the first investigation of Martin Servaz, who focuses his attention on Erik Lang, an author of crime novels with cruel and disturbing overtones, among which is one titled precisely The First Communion, and of whom the two sisters were fervent followers. The case is closed following an unforeseen outcome, which leaves Servaz corroded by doubt.
February 2018. The writer Erik Lang discovers his murdered wife, also dressed in first communion. Twenty-five years later, Martin Servaz is once again immersed in that double crime and his old fears reawaken, to the point of bordering on obsession.
Under the ice
The human being can end up being a more ruthless beast than any of the worst real or imagined beasts. Martin Servaz faces his new case with that perspective of the macabre of the murderer capable of decapitating a horse in a rugged area of ​​the French Pyrenees. The cruel way of eliminating an animal cannot be a gratuitous action. There is something ominous, an aspect of an atavistic death ceremony that seems to anticipate a repercussion on other levels, like a sudden storm that plunged from the mountain peaks into the deep valley.
Martin is a type gifted for that deductive capacity that goes beyond the mere discovery of the bloody discovery. In a tangential meeting, Martin discovers Diane Berg, a brand new psychologist at the psychiatric hospital located in the same area where her research should be carried out. Between them they will discover a strange telluric force that may be ruling with sinister will the inhabitants of that space between ancient mountains and silent forests. Because beyond that life is hard in those parts.
Nothing justifies that common sullen character to the sinister. The worst of all is that the people of the place, among whom are or find the minds or twisted minds capable of decapitation of the animal, seem to understand a lot of symbols, enigmas, mysteries of the area, of silenced secrets that they keep , under the snow, the promises of spring or the bones of other victims.
There is a special harmony between landscape and characters, between setting and personalities, a terrifying conspiracy so that, as a reader, you discover in each inhabitant of those mountains a thread of suspicion that seems to invite you to the deepest terror, the one that evokes the essence of the human being as originally belonging to other dark times where survival was a matter of norms born of obscurantism and old beliefs. Anyone else would abandon the idea of ​​getting anything clear, but Martin will try to unearth the greatest secrets of that valley.
Other recommended novels by Bernard Minier
Valley
And there are now six installments with "The Valley" for a series focused on a Martin Servaz camouflaged in the Pyrenees whose echoes from the peaks to the wide valleys passing through the narrow canyons bring remote echoes of revenge, blood and madness...
In the middle of the night, a mysterious phone call takes Martin Servaz to Aigues-Vives, a remote village in the Pyrenees, where the police have been mobilized due to a series of particularly sophisticated murders. Servaz meets with Irène Ziegler, director of the investigation brigade of the Pau gendarmerie. And while they are preparing to clarify these macabre murders, a part of the mountain collapses, cutting off the only road that leads to Aigues-Vives and leaving the murderers, victims and investigators confined to the valley.
In a suffocating atmosphere, where the Pyrenees become a true character in the novel, Bernard Minier gives us a great thriller in which Martin Servaz will have to face the ghosts of his past without remedy.
The circle
Minier's fetish character is Commander Servaz, a policeman who, as can be seen in the aforementioned novel, Under the Ice, must keep his nerves of steel so as not to succumb to the perverse approaches of its author. Because in this case a new death attentive to the mental integrity of MartÃn Servaz. The probable murderer of a young woman, in her own pool, is the son of a great friend of MartÃn's, his beloved Marianne, the only woman he continues to love, probably because of that magnetic idealization of the impossible.
And even if it was impossible to reconcile with her, he would do anything not to see her devastated by the disastrous future of a son accused of murder and immersed in the labyrinth of drugs. That is why MartÃn Servaz decides to investigate more thoroughly than ever, putting all his senses on the slopes and dedicating more hours than he can humanly perform. But he feels indebted to Marianne… the problem is that the debt will go from bad to worse as he uncovers more and more obscure details.
Do not turn off the light
With this novel, a particular trilogy of despair closes, awaiting continuations around Martin Servaz. Receiving Marianne's heart in a box, as an ominous gift from the most twisted mind, almost meant the mental and emotional breakdown of Martin. Everything was up to the depraved Julian Hirtmann who served his particular revenge in the most damaging way possible. But the worst is not over yet. Perhaps knowing of Captain Martin's moments of weakness, a sinister new plan seems to loom over him.
Martin might have missed it, but deep down in his darkened soul he wants to play, hoping he can throw his own whip on the table. The game has the captain together with a journalist who seems the appropriate person to compose the particular scenario of the psychopath on duty who "only" seems bent on possessing the souls of Martin and Christine. Because the weakness of the soul can lead to madness, to submission to evil, to a vision of the world dependent on the voice of the wicked master.
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