There are arrivals to literature that feel like a real earthquake. The irruption of the Sevillian writer Susana Martin Gijon in the black gender it reproduces like an earthquake of rhythmic aftershocks, reproduced thanks to such prolific creativity.
In her first five years deeply immersed in the craft of writing, Susana had already introduced us to two criminal series where the most intense suspense is mixed with that deductive ingenuity to end up composing stories that are also diverse in plot.
Because one thing is to write series and another thing is to always abound in the same thing. Nothing better than resorting to the imagination, as this author does, to always offer glimpses of hotly updated social aspects or necessary awareness.
But in this genre literature towards entertainment in essence we must never lose focus on pretentiousness or other misaligned intentions.
In Susana's novels everything is balanced and seasoned in the right measure on a clearly core main action, classic in its presentation, middle and end where the know-how of the good writer is manifested in the twists, the half-truths and the sustained tension …
Top 3 recommended novels by Susana Martín Gijón
Planet
We will never know who is more meticulous, Inspector Camino Vargas or her author. Because Susana Martín Gijón has built a trilogy with a spectacular annual cadence. A titanic work that culminates at the top with an epic trilogy closure.
The appearance on a golf course of a woman's bled corpse puts the Seville Homicide Group in check: the victim's feet have been severed. Inspector Camino Vargas will have to cancel her planned vacation with Paco Arenas, her old mentor and secret love with whom she finally lives, to start investigating in the middle of a city on high alert due to weather conditions and devastated by torrential rains that have left several missing.
Meanwhile, the news is increasing that the murderer nicknamed the Animalista could still be alive and would not be acting alone: skinned men on a farm, a bloody event in an aquarium and a mysterious robbery in the port of Huelva seem to draw a plan grotesque. But soon the entire brigade will be involved in a race against time to rescue millions of people from a danger much greater than anyone had realized before.
Progeny
Yes, the matter is about descendants marked by genetics, as we already intuited in the title. It is about sinister phobias that point to the very origin of life as a sick animosity. A hatred of everything human concentrated in a single mind that focuses its power of destruction around a work of blinding lucidity and brilliant blood, in the middle of a city as alive as Seville.
Because of course, light and heat do not always translate into happiness, optimism and vitamin D. Excess heat robs sleep and disrupts behaviors. Camino Vargas knows this well when he faces an outrage that points to voluntary homicide and finally premeditated murder.
As the sinister chain of death of the woman run over points to more perverse considerations, the researcher Camino Vargas will glimpse what may come his way. The latent idea that death can bring a criminal message... As it is becoming clear. Because the victim was also pregnant, which further twists the arrest of the murderer who placed the pacifier in the woman's mouth.
No one bothers himself with such strident ceremoniousness in his crime unless he is willing to give more direction to his work. Camino knows that the disturbance of the serial killer is like that, he wakes up on a bad day and develops towards unapproachable potential projections and future trends as the irrepressible mechanism of a defective work of God.
I wish it had all just pointed to the victim's ex-partner. But the anger unleashed and the chain of death started will change the focus to something much worse. The heat of Seville like hell more true than ever, beyond climatic metaphors. With that disturbing aroma of nearby events in a close and realistic scenery, Progeny ends up assaulting us like one of the most powerful thrillers of 2020.
Babylon 1580
Thrillers well placed in a remote historical setting have a lot to gain in the hands of a good suspense writer. From that naturally dark setting in almost everything human, from the religious and ideological to the merely physical, we can empathize with any unfortunate person who has to face that world.
Year of the Lord of 1580. Seville lives its moment of maximum splendor as the capital of trade between the New and the Old World.
Her Majesty's Fleet of the Indies is about to set sail when the skin torn from a woman's face and her red hair appear attached like a macabre disguise to the figurehead of the Soberbia, the warship that opens the convoy.
Next to the port neighborhood of Arenal, in an area surrounded by high walls, is La Babilonia, the most sought after brothel and where Damiana works. A few meters from there is the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, where Sister Catalina lives in cloister. Both were childhood friends and they will be brought together again in order to find out who committed such a brutal murder and why. To do so they will endanger their own lives, but also the best kept secret of the Crown.
Other recommended books by Susana Martín Gijón…
Species
The second parts always have a marked transition point. Even more so in a work decidedly born out of those three installments that every best-selling author sees as a goal. Because readers also enjoy that of a series neither as short as two parts nor as unpredictably long when all three are over. And that in the case of inspector Vargas we can expect anything. Because women have many battles...
It is summer in Seville. Inspector Camino Vargas continues as head of Homicide. Paco Arenas, her mentor and her secret love, is on sick leave and she doesn't want to lead her team and even less to train the young agent Evita Gallego. When the bodies of a skinned man, a man beaten to a pulp, and another man bloated with food to bursting are found abandoned in landmarks across the city, the clues point to a mysterious serial killer. Only Gallego will know how to read the macabre message in the corpses and accompany Camino on a new descent into hell.
More than bodies
The worst thing, the essentially most ominous thing about marketing with the human, is the consideration of our neighbor as mere flesh. In that inconsideration, in that impossible empathy, the darkness and unhappiness of the soul that governs those who act in this way is manifested. When man acts against woman based on force as an element of superiority towards destruction, everything in that man is lost... And crime becomes the most monstrous transformation of humanity.
There are some invisible crimes. Crimes that hardly leave behind a headline in the press and a routine police investigation that soon becomes statistics and a file. Annika Kaunda, a police specialist in gender issues, discovers gaps in the investigation of these unrelated cases. Faced with the indifference of her superiors and the rush to shelve the matter, she decides to secretly follow the few clues available. If her suspicions were true, her appearances could hide a plot as terrible as it is close.
From eternity
Second parts are good when you have something interesting to tell about it. And Susana had it this second time. As it shows that this saga of the researcher Annika Kaunda has been extended in many new installments ...
A quiet city like Mérida comes to the fore in the news for two almost simultaneous crimes. The owner of a Roman-style spa is found stabbed in its hot springs. A senior member of the regional government is seriously injured during a public event.
They seem like cases without any connection, but agent Annika Kaunda does not think so, especially when she discovers a puzzling fact: the weapons used in both crimes can be almost two thousand years old.
