You can always find authors who consider that success has not reached them as it should, at least in Spain. Great writers who for whatever reason do not finish giving that blow on the table of the big publishers.
British writer Simon Beckett It still does not have that great pull within the black genre in our country, but it is a world reference of the literary thriller. Because in their novels capitalized by anthropologist David Hunter, at the service of criminal investigation, ends up standing out as a great creator of those disturbing atmospheres of all suspense.
In the end, their plots end up combining the suggestive of the scientific, towards the clues of the psychopath on duty who intends the perfect murder, with a purely police taste that offers new energy to classic aspects of the genre in which reader, author and protagonist sweat the same. ink to reveal the gruesomeness of the matter.
Not long ago some other leading publisher in Spain has recovered some of his novels. And I hope that all the others will come later ...
3 best Simon Beckett novels
The chemistry of death
The beginnings of David Huner immerse us in that tragic aspect that shook the life of this forensic investigator. From that fateful moment, presented in flashes throughout this first novel, good old Hunter decides to redirect his career in medicine towards much kinder tasks, trying to mend his battered soul.
But where he ends up sheltering from everything, he must also assume his share of responsibility from his Hippocratic oath. Because when some children discover a corpse in a macabre representation, they end up being impelled to take action on the matter.
Especially when the police in the small town of Manham require his services. Because deep down, everyone knows about David's past, as is often the case in any small village where a new neighbor arrives.
The worst predictions end up coming true and the dead stranger with duck wings is joined by a disappearance that adds tension and suspicions to any of the local inhabitants, including David or the histrionic priest.
Tension is not the best environment to work on such a delicate matter. Hunter feels pressured, almost overwhelmed in a suffocating environment.
But there is no choice but to investigate the wounds and blows of the dead man, or project the brief clues towards deductions of the possible to point to a resolution that, otherwise, threatens to destabilize everything in Manham.
Among the ashes
That of the lonely places of northern Europe is a recurring scenario in many authors of Nordic crime novels. Emblematic is the recent case of the Fjällbacka, of Camilla Lackberg. It is about finding that natural space unapproachable to the eye, exposed to disturbing horizons with games of light that awaken that perfect estrangement so that the darkest plots sink in with greater intensity.
In the case of David Hunter we go to some lost islands in the north of Great Britain, in Scotland. Our fascinating researcher has re-entered the spiral of his forensic anthropology and with certain reluctance, because now his life seems to be finding new positive personal directions, heading to the island of Runa to investigate a strange death by burning in a house where There is not the slightest sign of fire.
The problem is that while Hunter launches an investigation into a matter that all the locals seem to want to put on hold, a gigantic storm leaves them all isolated together. Hunter against all those disturbing glances. Will it be worth delving into the truth? What price could it have for him?
The whisper of the dead
Hunter's third novel takes us to what is known as the American "Body Farm", a forensic anthropology complex located in Tennessee that, as you can guess, is loaded with black legends in the popular imagination.
Because there it is said that human bodies are used for a thousand and one investigations on decomposition, analysis and various aspects on which to learn even more for the benefit of that science at the service of law. David Hunter makes his particular training trip to the body farm.
But it will not be necessary to tackle dark aspects of doors inside the farm. Because soon abroad, it will be the police who alert the investigators of a murder that targets an insane capable of everything, as will be demonstrated in his next victim.
A new investigation against the clock in which the criminal seems to have taken the dark pleasure of going to the focus of forensic anthropology to challenge as many investigators capable of reading the prints on the bodies as authentic translators.
