The 3 best books by Luca D'Andrea

El italian noir advances sheltered by the long shadow of a Camilleri in the image and likeness of what it can represent Vazquez Montalban in Spain.

And it is not that each new author pays homage to this type of references just because. It is rather that they, the referents, were already responsible at the time for splashing the general imagination of a genre with their imprint from Latin noir (perhaps also tangentially including French polar). Everything is transmuted in these parts where blackness hovers intensely with corruption, mafias and police on the edge of good and evil.

In these he broke Luca D'Andrea, with his first crime novel turned into an international phenomenon after a narrative evolution focused on very different themes. But it is that the black genre ends up being a fishing ground for authors, necessary to meet the demand of readers in search of stories in tune with the dark times that run.

And Luca D´Andrea knows what to do with his particular evolution towards a subgenre of scenes, mountains, open spaces at times agoraphobic thanks to that tension extended like an echo of homicide bouncing between the monstrous rocks.

Top recommended novels by Luca D´Andrea

lissy

Things that happen in the last century, no less. And yet an elongated shadow that looms over the future of one of those typically Andrea spaces. Valleys as open as capable of awakening contradictory sensations that the world can collapse on those who live there. And it is that for the ancient rocks that contemplate us, yesterday is also a remote day in our existence. A day from which a creepy story is built from the intrigue and suspense that it entails ...

When young Marlene discovers in the winter of 1974 that she is pregnant with Herr Wegener, her husband and the most feared man in all of Tyrol, she realizes that she must escape if she wants to raise her child away from violence. But in her escape she has a road accident from which she is saved by Simon Keller, a mountain farmer who lives in the traditional Tyrolean style.

While he cares for her on his remote farm, Herr Wegener is determined to defend his reputation with the Consortium, the powerful criminal organization he pays homage to. The hunt has been entrusted to an infallible hit man, as cold as he is deadly, nicknamed the Trusted Man, who will not stop until he completes his mission. Soon Marlene won't know which threat is greater: her husband, the nameless killer, or Lissy, the darkest mystery on Keller's farm.

The substance of evil

There is more than one analogy between this book The substance of evil and the bestseller The truth about the Harry Quebert case. I do not mean by this that the books replicate their plots. It's just curious, to begin with, that the title of this novel looks so much like the one in the book The origin of evil, a work that hides much of the mystery of the well-known Joël Dicker bestseller.

If to this we add the unsolved cases of the death of Nola in 1975 and that of the Schaltzmann family that assails us in this case and that occurred in 1985, it can be considered that both works have a twin thread that they pull throughout the plot .

But the style of each author is what it is, and I will not be the one to compare. In this case, the investigator of the death of the Schatzlmann family will be Jeremiah Salinger, a documentarian used to extracting information from wherever it is needed. When he learned of the ominous murder of the indicated family, back in 1985 he began to investigate to find out what could have happened.

Silence as any answer. From his in-laws, a native of the area, to any improvised witness that he wants to look for. Nobody knows or wants to know anything about what happened.

Jeremiah knows that silence, it is fear that generates it, like a current filtered from the singular and nearby Dolomite mountains. And he also knows that the same fear can turn against him. The human being, once scared can become violent... But once fully involved in the case, Jeremiah cannot abandon it. The idea of ​​a murdered family, with its members bestially mutilated, is too hard for him to bear.

When everyone in a place is afraid it can be for two reasons: It may well be that the case splashes them for some reason or it could also be that something strange, anomalous, supernatural and obviously macabre buried everyone's will.

Be that as it may, the truth is that the plot will hook you from the first moment. The microcosm of characters from the small town feel so close that you will seem to breathe their fear and intuit their troubled soul. An incomparable black novel, to finally close all links with any previous work by any author. The only thing that is really certain is that it does not disappoint crime novel lovers like me.

The substance of evil

The death of Erika Knapp

The contrasts and their ability to awaken even more marked sensations in the reader. The bucolic, the idealization of life secluded in a comfortable corner of the world between silent mountains. Inner peace and balance, the finally happily accepted feeling that solitude can be the haven to reconnect with oneself.

But precisely from that calm, the details, the little anecdotes and the chance encounters, begin to draw their probabilities and destiny marks. And then everything seems more like a plan, a sinister adventure with an unimaginable ending.

Tony Carcano leads an isolated and monotonous life, in which the only emotions he experiences are those described in his own books, love novels that have long provided him with success and well-being. However, Sibylle, a reckless and charming twenty-something, bursts into his life with an old photo that portrays him young and smiling next to the corpse of a woman: Erika Knapp.

Tony is forced to pick up the threads of a story that he wanted to leave behind for a long time. Together with Sibylle, he will have to re-enter the shadows of the small Tyrolean town of Kreuzwirt, where a mystery made of lies, violence, madness and greed hides. East thriller, with overwhelming power and a diabolical rhythm, it will make a hidden secret resurface for more than twenty years, opening wide the floodgates of hell.

The death of Erika Knapp
5/5 - (13 votes)

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