In the same way that virtue is at the center, grace resides in the mixture, in the success with the ingredients or elements that make up the whole. From that, to find the point in the mix, a Ignatius of the Valley that usually composes historical fictions that are both historical fictions and turns into mystery plots and even into thrillers.
In his best known series, Ignacio disguises himself as Arturo Perez Reverte (in his Falcó series) to delve into the dark days of the mid-XNUMXth century in Spain. The gloomy scenography of those days runs on account of a reality bent on the ominous. Then come the particular vicissitudes of a Spanish-style hero such as Arturo Andrade to end up composing a vibrant set of tension and arguments.
But beyond this series, Ignacio del Valle lavishes on new novels of current or remote scenery, linking with moments in more recent history or rescuing very rich intrahistories that still earn more in the narrations extended by this author. So you can always find a good novel invoice del Valle SA
Top 3 recommended novels by Ignacio del Valle
The art of slaying dragons
The first part of a memorable saga. The gray post-war Spain, with its clientelism, its mafias and the chiaroscuro of a power subjected to constant anxiety. A movement never consistent enough to overthrow the dictator or precisely interested in his permanence.
Because you can always get great business from authoritarian leaders. The character of Serrano Suñer, mythologized over time by some and still more reviled by others, acquires in this story the relevance of a dark character in a crime novel.
1939. The young lieutenant Arturo Andrade receives a commission from the High General Staff: to find a work of art belonging to the Prado Museum that has been mysteriously lost during the Republic. Is about The art of slaying dragons, an enigmatic anonymous table from the XNUMXth century whose recovery is demanded by Serrano Suñer himself.
What is behind this disappearance? Arturo does not know that the search for the painting will lead him to uncover the trafficking of works of art and weapons during the hardest years in recent Spanish history, but also, along the way, to discover himself.
A murky and politically secret past makes Andrade an easy prey for human passions and irrepressible love for the ideal. The obsession with the painting will grow in the lieutenant along with the pain for the woman he loves and for the old code of lost honor, both unattainable dreams.
Coronado
The years in which the Spanish empire was formed thanks to the chance of an unforeseen discovery went a long way. Because beyond the conquests, the new maps of the new worlds and the "clash" between American and European civilizations, we always find those intra-histories open to glorious adventures and disturbing events ...
The mythical city of CÃbola and the search for a new El Dorado led Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to the southern United States. For the first time, European eyes saw those lands: immense deserts, red canyons, great plains full of bison, dangerous indigenous tribes, among them the Apaches ...
They were years of conquest and evangelization of a still unknown part of the New World, years plagued with confrontations and diseases, but also with glories and goals achieved.
A time that saw massacres on both sides, suffered and committed, or events as fundamental in history as the fall of the Mexica civilization; but at the same time, they were, like all, times of human beings who lived, suffered, loved and died; men and women (this one with a forgotten role), who made up a world that still dazzles us today.
And it is the open, nonconformist, amazed and admired look of a Franciscan, Brother Tomás de Urquiza, who tells us his story. Years later, in 1564, he remembers the expedition in which, twenty years before, he accompanied Coronado... and, since then, nothing has ever been the same.
As if he were an ancient chronicler of the Indies, Ignacio del Valle gives us a vibrant and at the same time meticulous narrative, in which the facts reach the reader like the close-ups of a film. And together with Brother Tomás, thanks to his accurate vision, full of pros and cons, we immerse ourselves in the New World of the mid-XNUMXth century.
Black suns
Arturo Andrade has given a lot of himself so far. And what is likely to come. In this fourth installment of the saga, with a character with whom we have already lived a thousand and one adventures, we suffer and sweat in the first person a tension between the sinister, the desperate and an overwhelming desire to know the truth.
Captain Arturo Andrade, a member of the SIAEM (Information Section of the High General Staff), is assigned to Pueblo Adentro, a village a few kilometers from his native Badajoz and center of the Extremaduran anarchist resistance. Unable to make peace with the demons of the past, he will have to investigate the mysterious murder of a young girl.
But the corpse of the little girl is only the tip of the iceberg that leads to the highest echelons of the regime, in which men willing to do anything to fulfill the peculiar wishes of some powerful men work.
Andrade and his friend Manolete, a former comrade in arms in the Blue Division, will cross their paths with the honor of the anarchist Ventura RodrÃguez and his family, in a race against time to save the life of a missing girl and discover the truth.
