There are countries or regions with a large pool of authors of the current genre (we cannot ignore Nordic noir as a paradigm). But we also find, on the contrary, writers from countries without quarry who end up being the part for the whole and standing out with his name as a flag. Precisely for breaking in from a wasteland of ignorance of readers from all over the world regarding that less popular origin.
The Cypriot alex michaelides He no longer has anything to envy others of his generation like himself John Gomez Jurado, if we look from the inside. And Michaelides has barely begun his literary career, settling on the most merciless suspense, on the ingenious twists and on the tension that advances from borderline confusion with fear.
It couldn't be any other way for a narrator accustomed, until his first great success in a novel, to more tangible scenarios as a film scriptwriter. But literature is what it has, it doesn't depend on anyone, neither producers, nor actors, nor huge budgets for special effects, nor filming licenses. Everything is born from the imagination and from there it spreads to readers already dazzled by those obscurities proposed by Michaelides.
Beyond the natural love of all black genre writers for the criminal, Michaelides is basically thrillers from the inside out, based on the fears and tensions under the skin of his characters. The unsolved cases thus take place in parallel to the lives of their protagonists. The set of his novels are puzzles of deceptive pieces, gigantic labyrinths about guilt, secrets and other maps of the destiny of those that seem to be about to be devoured by darkness. A doom that happens before our eyes just before we see them appear on the news with their lurid story. So yes, we can finally know in detail the morbid details of what happens on that wild side ...
Top recommended books by Alex Michaelides
The silent patient
Justice almost always seeks compensation. In case it cannot be done, or even if it can be compensated in some way but some damage prevails, it also has punishment as a tool. In any case, Justice always needs the objective truth from which to qualify some facts.
But Alicia Berenson is not willing to say anything enlightening in the face of the evidence that unfailingly points her to the murder of her husband. Without testimony from the accused, Justice always seems to be limping. Even more so for a society that observes in astonishment a woman whose sealed lips do not explain anything, they do not clarify anything. And silence, of course, awakens the echoes of curiosity throughout England.
If the opening plot already invites that special and fascinating sense of suspense in an introspective way towards the character of Alice, as Theo Faber tries to delve into those sealed motifs, the plot takes on more and more tension.
Alicia Berenson and her circumstances as a study base for this psychologist determined to bring light. A prestigious artist with a seemingly normal life. Until that click in the brain followed by five shots to the head from her husband… Then the silence.
Theo arrives at the prison where Alicia is serving her sentence. Approaching women is obviously not easy at all. But Theo has the tools to tie up some rope, pull some thread from that silence as a refuge, but from which every human must emerge from time to time like an animal in its burrow. Not only words convey information...
Until Theo comes to consider knowing everything. Because he, the only person who is approaching, descending into the well of Alicia's psyche, begins to fear that he will also be without light before the terrifying last truth that can await him and that will upset everything.
The Maidens
The term maiden sounds as archaic as it is sinister because it even points to the view of female sexuality as a trophy. And because it awakens that aberrant feeling of masculinity as a perverse notion of superiority. A superiority from which the evil idea that they belong to him can emerge. Because only he is capable of guiding them and convincing them to give themselves body and soul...
At thirty-six years old, Mariana is trying to recover from the loss of Sebastián, the great love of her life, who drowned during a vacation on a Greek island. She works in London as a therapist, but when her niece Zoe, the only family she has left, calls her from Cambridge to tell her that Tara, her best friend, has been brutally murdered near the student residence, she decides to come to her aid.
There he meets Fosca, a charismatic professor of Classical Philology. The professor maintains a study group with a very select number of female disciples, all beautiful and from elite families, of which Tara was a part: the Maidens. In the young woman's bedroom, Mariana finds a postcard with some verses in classical Greek that demand a sacrifice. Soon the corpses of other Maidens will appear on campus with their eyes gouged out and a pineapple in hand, and Mariana will not only have to face the resolution of these crimes, but also the ghosts of her own past.
La furia
The most antagonistic emotions and their fatal meeting at the poles. Too much love will kill you, as good old Freddy Mercury said. Nothing is more true and nothing is more known by those who manage to reach the most extreme of love, where life hurts and wears out, just to think that existence can exist without that other loved one. Madness then is nothing other than reason, which, as Heine would say, has made the firm determination to go mad.
This is the story of a murder. Or perhaps this is not entirely true. At its core, it is above all a love story. Lana Farrar is a former movie star, a fashion icon admired for years. Since her husband died, she has lived as a recluse in her London mansion. Every year she invites her closest friends to escape the English climate and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island, a small islet of luxury buffeted by a powerful wind that the locals call "the fury."
When the fury leaves the group trapped on the island without being able to leave, old friendships end up bringing out the hatred, envy and desire for revenge repressed for years. And suddenly someone disappears. Thus begins a game of schemes and traps, a battle of wits full of twists and surprises that leads to an unforgettable ending where echoes of the fearsome The Grove, the famous psychiatric hospital from The Silent Patient, resonate.
