With the writer Maria Oruña the current podium of black novel authors in Spain is formed, an honorary space that shares with Dolores Redondo y Eva Garcia Saez. It is not that I mean that we do not find more writers who cultivate this genre with similar gifts, but without a doubt these three are the most fashionable authors in the literary scene of the black genre in Spain.
And this preponderance is due to a trend shared by the genre sagas: El Baztán, La Ciudad Blanca and ¿Suances? that each one of them has successfully developed in different locations of the Spanish geography.
In other words, in some way these three authors complement each other, contributing their particular imprint that has fed a genre of success for many years in line with the sign of the times, sometimes also sinister ...
With regard to María Oruña, the usual black outburst of her novels serves to develop plots that go much further. Great mysteries between centuries-old walls, customs of the Cantabrian coast as an enigmatic idiosyncrasy and the thousand-year-old whispering accomplice of the sea breaking against the steep coasts. At the moment, the author's scenarios achieve a special communion between the telluric forces of space and the intensity of the plot developed.
Top 3 recommended novels by María Oruña
the path of fire
María Oruña's characters are gaining presence in a leading role that extends through her works with that residue of the great protagonists of black literature or mystery. A fascinating installment ascending from the Bay of Biscay to reach latitudes between the Atlantic and the foggiest epicontinental seas of Scotland...
Inspector Valentina Redondo and her partner Oliver decide to take a vacation and travel to Scotland to visit Oliver's family. His father, Arthur Gordon, is bent on reclaiming some of the heritage and history of his ancestors and has purchased Huntly Castle in the Highlands, which had been in his family until the XNUMXth century.
During the rehabilitation of the building, he finds a tiny office that had been hidden for two hundred years and in it, documents that reveal that Lord Byron's memoirs (supposedly burned at the beginning of the XNUMXth century) may still be intact and be found within those walls. Soon word of the extraordinary find will spread and both the press from all over the country and several people close to the family will approach them to follow the curious event.
However, the appearance of a dead man in the castle will cause Oliver and Valentina to plunge into an unexpected investigation that will take them deep into the Scotland of bygone times and that will change the destiny of the Gordons and even history itself. At the same time, we will travel to the mid-nineteenth century and discover how Jules Berlioz (a modest bookseller from the Highlands) and Mary MacLeod (a young woman from a wealthy Scottish family) cross paths on a literary and forbidden path in which crime It will sprinkle everything with doubts and silence until our days.
What the tide hides
There are sagas of the purest noir that as they advance they get more rhythm. Thanks to the balance between the new cases and the recurring scenery and characters, the readers get trapped in those narrative universes that are gaining more dimension.
After the trilogy, and after alternating some other novel with which to take greater perspective, this installment of The books of the hidden port it turns out to be an electrical, disturbing plot ...
The president of the Real Club de Tenis de Santander, one of the most powerful women in the city, has been found dead in the cabin of a beautiful schooner that, with a few select guests, was sailing the waters of the bay at dusk.
The crime is reminiscent of the novels of the "locked room" at the beginning of the last century: the compartment was closed on the inside, both the strange wound presented by the businesswoman's body and the mysterious method used to carry out the murder are inexplicable and all the Party guests seem to have reason to have ended his life. No one can have left or entered the ship to commit the crime or escape. Who Killed Judith Pombo? How? And because?
Where we were invincible
We travel to Suances. The sudden death of a gardener at the Palace of the Master, while carrying out his maintenance tasks, seems to be associated with the simple fatality of an untimely death caused by heart failure.
The very seasonal setting of a summer that remits in favor of the melancholy of autumn seems one more argument towards that intention to transform reality into a telluric whim, in a call from the earth, in an evocation of the old house, in a first evening chill of sunset that seeks the new bosom of late summer.
The first and biggest surprised by the sad event is the own occupant of the house. The writer Carlos Green, fully recognized in his trade there in America, although originally from the cradle of that old house, does not give credit for the death of the gardener. Affected and contrite, he tells Lieutenant Valentina Redondo that a certain omen had been approaching him lately.
Except that being a man of letters, it is understood that the imagination can end up overflowing on certain occasions. For an empirical person like Valentina, the sensations that Carlos Green has transmitted to him sound like the delirium of a Poe locked in his cell and writing nonstop delirious and dark stories.
And yet there is always a moment to begin to believe in something more than what the eyes guess and complete the rest of the senses. Because despite the fact that the gardener has died only because his heart stopped beating, some strange traces reveal a contact prior to the end of his life ...
Valentina and her team of technicians; Oliver his partner and Carlos Green; even the inhabitants of Suances, especially some of them. Among all these characters a current from the past moves, an ancestral secret, a gloomy whisper of the wind between the branches that seems to reach the reader's ear ...
Other recommended books by María Oruña…
The inocents
Collateral damage can be the best disguise to carry out the perfect crime. For the criminal on duty, each of the lives taken for his purpose does not matter at all. The best justice should be to make him feel the suffering inflicted on him. But the question is to be able to find that thread to pull from among so many possible targets set by the murderer.
There are two weeks left until the wedding of Lieutenant Valentina Redondo and Oliver Gordon. In the midst of the preparations, they are surprised by the news of a massive attack on the Water Temple of the famous Cantabrian spa of Puente Viesgo.
The facilities of the idyllic water paradise had been occupied by several businessmen, and everything points to the fact that the massacre was perpetrated with a very dangerous chemical weapon. Valentina will have to cooperate with the army and with a UCO team to solve the crime.
They will soon discover that a skillful and cruel brain has set in motion an infallible machinery, executing each of their movements with extraordinary coldness, in a clear challenge to the intelligence and deductive abilities of Valentina and the reader himself. Lieutenant Redondo will come to doubt the steps she should follow, because her suspicions will soon fall on someone she has never seen but who, deep down, she feels she knows. Danger is a heartbeat that never goes out.
Hidden port
The first works with which a writer like María reaches the general public maintain the charm of novelty, of the imaginary that bursts into other established authors. If, in addition, the gender labeling is complemented by a new miscegenation, in this case around a genre of greater suspense, all the better.
In Puerto Escondido we discovered Oliver, who had just arrived in Suances from far away English lands. He is the heir to a great manor house where he finds a retreat space to give himself time on the mission of putting his life back together.
But reality will be determined to disrupt his plans as soon as he faces an infanticide hidden behind the wall of the basement of the house. The truth must be such a sordid affair that as soon as Oliver engages the authorities, a chain of murders in the area are reproduced with a cadence that points directly to Oliver himself ...
A place to go
After the frenzied events of the previous installment, a new victim awakens sinister chills again among residents of the area and the police themselves.
But beyond the sad event, everything that concerns the young victim puzzles locals and strangers at the same time that it introduces the reader into an enigma that attentive to everything possible.
The past, some mysterious ruins and the victim herself point to a kind of time tunnel from which a message seems to have been sent on the victim's body. As death spreads through the environment, the anomaly ends up awakening total panic. Once again Oliver is caught up in the strange events.
Perhaps the most logical thing would be to finally flee from that place. But the evil ends up splashing him too directly and he will need to find out what is happening ...
The forest of the four winds
This time we go a little further inland, until an Orense turned into that mirror between two moments separated by centuries. A fascinating feeling of time shared towards solving an enigma, recovering the magic of certain places, its telluric force, the powerful energies superior to the vectors of our time.
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, Dr. Vallejo traveled from Valladolid to Galicia together with his daughter Marina to serve as a doctor in a powerful monastery in Ourense. There they will discover some very particular customs and they will experience the fall of the Church. Marina, interested in medicine and botany but without permission to study, will fight against the conventions that her time imposes on knowledge and love and will be immersed in an adventure that will keep a secret for more than a thousand years.
In our day, Jon Bécquer, an unusual anthropologist who works locating lost historical pieces, investigates a legend. As soon as they begin their investigations, in the garden of the old monastery the corpse of a man dressed in a Benedictine habit of the XIX appears. This fact will make Bécquer go deep into the forests of Galicia looking for answers and descending the surprising steps of time.
