Sometimes the exotic serves perfectly to enliven a literary genre adocerated from common or typical settings. The literature noir it has that I don't know what connection with the western, with the sociopolitical systems of a world replicated in its apparent greatness and its buried miseries.
So the arrival of manook (either the signer Ian or the real Patrick), with his detective novels brought to Mongolia thanks to its curator Yeruldelgger, are a social prospect in a world far from our ethnocentrism, as well as a suggestive approach that does not forget crime as a basis from which to develop a plot.
The result for Manook is that originality that every author tries to stand out. The imprint of each one, the way of narrating, long ago. But if Manook is also capable of offering a radical change of focus towards unknown spaces, the novelty breaks schemes for the better.
Because in distant Mongolia we rethink the moral and sociological foundations around crime. And so the suspense is complemented by that informative aspect about our own species far beyond our preconceived vision of the world.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Ian Manook
Yeruldelgger. Dead in the steppe
The approach to the spaces of evil always disturbs us. The morbid essence of genres that go between crime and suspense is undeniable. The point is that Manook knew that this magnetism, already coming from Edith and her turn to contemplate for the last time the city of Sodom devastated by God, could multiply in a remote place, in the lonely Mongolian steppes. to discover the corpse of a little girl buried, rather reluctantly abandoned in the middle of nowhere.
Between the wandering people of the vast empty spaces of Mongolia and the cosmopolitan inhabitants of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, there seems to be a gulf in the way of understanding life. The shock is triggered from the paradigmatic appearance of the overwhelming cruelty of such a corpse.Manook launches to investigate, pulling the few strings that he can find thanks to his companions, Inspector Oyun and Coroner Solongo, a particular investigative triangle with its angles very marked in various aspects ...
The novel is a journey full of fascination among vast landscapes as a metaphor for the unapproachable nature of a human soul capable of everything. From nomadism to the urban as a universal representation of evil and sin thanks to uncontrolled ambition, the lust for power and the ominous drift of the human being devastated by such forces.
Yeruldelgger. Wild times
In light of the success of the first novel in the Yeruldelgger saga, (which surely even surprised a Mannok who broke into the black genre after 60 years), it seemed appropriate to continue the adventures of a curator with the force of Yeruldelgger's character and the intensity of a distant setting like Mongolia.
Because from the mix, that reading legion eager for new cases had emerged in the dichotomous scenario of this country capable of providing a transcendental vision of existence from its endless landscapes and its people with an ancestral vision at the same time that it was complemented with the worst of a world made city, with its necessary organization from which the worst emerges, the necessary power and the consequent corruption, the mafias.
In the middle of the frigid Mongolian steppes, Inspector Oyun, Assistant Commissioner Yeruldelgger, encounters a scene that is difficult to interpret: a rider and his horse lie crushed under the back of a female yak that appears to have fallen from the sky. His boss experiences the same surprise when, in a gorge of the Otgontenger massif, the corpse of a man who could only have ended up there is discovered… plunging down from above. And to close the circle of unusual events, the same commissioner is arrested as a suspect in the murder of Colette, a prostitute friend whom he had helped rebuild her life.
Deep in perplexity and fearful of being the victim of a trap, Yeruldelgger undertakes a clandestine investigation that will generate tensions with his team, reopen old wounds with his daughter Saraa and provoke the intervention of the Shaolin masters of the seventh monastery in which he was raised. The situation is completely turned upside down with the discovery of the lifeless bodies of a group of children inside a container in the port of Le Havre. Despite the thousands of kilometers that separate Mongolia from France, the tracks will eventually cross to uncover a case of corruption and abuse at all levels that affects the highest levels of various countries, from Europe to Asia.
Yeruldelgger. Nomadic death
A third part with such intensity that it appears as a necessary end. Although you never know with the editorial demands ... Because in his retirement in his yurt, our curator Yeruldelgger seems to want to lose himself until the last of his days. But the inertias of every policeman are that fatality made Murphy's law that always ends up devouring them.
The aroma at the end of the saga also comes from a leap to the world, to the global. Because also the issue of multinationals, their practice and their ethics assail the plot from the access to natural resources for which someone may be capable of anything.Thus, Yeruldelgger's retirement will last very little: against his will, two horsemen Strangers will propel him into action, and Yeruldelgger will thus be caught in a crossfire between mercenaries paid by voracious mining companies, immoral politicians, corrupt policemen and young followers of the Genghis Khan oath.
A bloody tangle in a Mongolia gutted by multinational bulldozers, plundered by the greed of speculators and ruined by the venality of its leaders, and from which Yeruldelgger, always faithful to his ideals, will not emerge unscathed. the first two installments, with more than half a million readers addicted to the exploits of the famous Mongolian commissioner, Yeruldelgger. Nomadic death puts a dramatic end to one of the most original series of recent times and is the goodbye of one of the most unforgettable characters in the crime novel.
