The 3 best books of Carme Chaparro

Back in 2017 we observed the awakening of the literary beast that is Carme Chaparro. In just over two years this journalist exploited her new communicative side in a fictional narrative, and specifically in a genre of suspense that dazzled thousands of readers, forgetting that media origin that weighs heavily on anyone who embarks on a new creative adventure.

Making an aside, here is a wonderful volume that collects the best of Carmen Chaparro:

The point is that once immersed in publishing books, this author also ventured into the field of non-fiction. Your book Quiet you are more beautiful gives free rein to that chronicler vein of our days that every journalist and columnist ends up orienting towards the essayistic.

Thus, based on the prolific activity of this writer, we look at a growing bibliography of Carmen Chaparro in which to enjoy with thrillers of maximum tension or, on the contrary, with interesting dissertations on the current world.

Top 3 recommended books of Carme Chaparro

Don't disappoint your father

There is something of ancient veneration in the father figure. Half habit, half attitude and nature of the paternal, conflicting emotions hover over that bond with the father capable of punishment and yearning for the demonstration, the not always achievable bar of what should become. In his absence, everything can be easier, except for an emotional part that always yearns for a kind of authority that only comes from the firm and tender hand of a father.

This is a novel for the bold.  Already on the first page the reader receives the first impact: keep reading if you dare, the author challenges us. If you do, you will attend the autopsy of a strange corpse at the Forensic Anatomical Institute of Madrid. It is the body of a young, famous, rich and depressed woman -Nina Vidal- who has been murdered with a cruelty as unimaginable as… creative?

Days later, the corpse of another young woman, also famous and rich, appears. The two victims were friends and had grown up together in the most elite and powerful environment in Spain.

Someone is imitating the most brutal torture in human history. Nina Vidal is murdered like the greedy Crassus, the Roman who brought Julius Caesar to power. María Vives is skinned with seashells, like Hypatia of Alexandria. Who will be the next victim? What torture has the murderer thought for her?

In a race against time, Ana Arén faces the greatest challenge of her professional career. What she will not know until the end is that all the research will lead her to solve the unknowns in her own life.

With a great ability to create plots and a frenetic pace in his writing, Carme Chaparro, which has earned a prominent position among the authors of crime novels, closes with Don't disappoint your father Ana Arén's trilogy.

I'm not a monster

The starting point of this book is a situation that seems extremely disturbing for all of us who are parents and who find spaces in shopping centers to free our little ones while browsing a shop window.

In that blink in which you lose your sight in a suit, in some fashion accessories, in your long-awaited new television, you suddenly discover that your son is no longer where you saw him in the previous second. The alarm goes off immediately in your brain, the psychosis announces its intense irruption. Children appear, always appear. But sometimes they don't. The seconds and minutes pass, you walk the bright corridors wrapped in a feeling of unreality.

You notice how people watch you move restlessly. You ask for help but no one has seen your little one. I'm not a monster reaches that fatal moment where you know something has happened, and it doesn't seem like anything good. The plot advances frantically in search of the lost child. The Inspector Ana Arén, aided by a journalist, immediately associates the disappearance with another case, that of Slenderman, the elusive kidnapper of another child.

Anxiety is the predominant sensation of a detective novel with that absolutely dramatic tinge that is assumed in the loss of a child. An almost journalistic treatment of the plot helps in this sensation, as if the reader could share the exclusives of the pages of events where the story is going to unfold.

The chemistry of hate

Ana Arén returns from her laureate role in the previous novel to face again with that fear that ends up transferring from the investigation to the private sphere of the inspector herself.

Because once again Ana Arén will have everything against it: the nature and sophistication of the crime, its threatening work environment, the inexhaustible voice of public opinion multiplied its volume with inexhaustible sources of early conviction and recrimination of the investigation itself. Because the victim is not just anybody. And when a homicide ends up splashing the popular imagination in which the emblematic figures, the powerful, the great men and women that make up that mirror in which everyone seeks to reflect, reside, the matter acquires the epic of the sinister. The murderer chose her, the charismatic and renowned woman. Perhaps an act of misogyny, perhaps a fan effect taken to the extreme of unhealthy obsession, without ruling out its closest environment, one in which surprises are always discovered.

But this time the premeditation reaches inscrutable levels. A crime always denotes a passion factor, a hatred, a concentrated chemistry towards the destruction of life. And yet the psychopath's reason can lead everything back with the necessary coldness. Because in the end it will be worth it. Once hatred finds its channel of expression, when its power and strength are unleashed on the body of the idol to be overthrown, everything will have been worth it ... And the worst of all is that surely Ana Arén is not in her best moment to face this new sample of evil as a desire for macabre glory in front of a people who watch in dismay the end of one of their great stars.

The virtue of the writer of suspense novels, of the dark thriller that triumphs in the present, is his ability to expose the characters until that moment in which the most malleable reason seems to reach its maximum elasticity. Despair and even madness loom sinister on the horizon. It is then that only the great surviving characters like Ana Arén can end up clinging to one last thread.

Other interesting books by Carme Chaparro

Punishment

From a journalist who turned to narrative to a writer who aims to become something like the Shari lapena Spanish. Because her capacity for that disturbing suspense that comes from the depths of her characters ends up soaking us to the bones.

Nines wakes up one morning expecting a birthday gift from her six-year-old son, but what she receives is his ear in a box with a bow. Thus begins an anguishing search that shocks the entire country. It will soon be discovered that it is not the first death of a child in that family, and that the case is related to the painful and strange performance of six young people who attend a television program.

In this scenario of pain and confusion, four old friends with many unfinished business meet again: Santi, a gifted and asocial forensic expert by day, a transvestite by night, with unorthodox methods and unpredictable genius; Berta, a journalist who had to flee Spain when her brother was accused of some terrible crimes and who managed to redeem herself and recover her professional prestige; Enlightened, bold and tireless reporter who has just finally received the much-deserved and unexpected accolade for her career. And always at Berta's side, Chiqui, the young computer genius capable of getting into any computer he sets his mind to.

The four of them immerse themselves in a complex and disturbing case that uncovers some of the murkiest recesses of the human soul: jealousy, unsatisfied desires, egos, child abuse... and the longing to be loved. A novel pierced by the conviction that only truth, love and mercy can alleviate pain, no matter how immense it may be. A thriller that is more than a thriller, it is a story of human beings taken to the limits of their emotions.

Crime

They say that without a good start you are lost in any story you dare to tell. About this novel Carme Chaparro assaults you from the first paragraph. Because reality falls heavily from a most sinister sky...

The first human being bursts against the asphalt at ten forty-two on the night of Sunday, June XNUMX. A man walking across the square instinctively looks up. He gives him time to see several people - he couldn't say how many, he later tells the police - on the windowsills of a skyscraper. And suddenly, before he can even be shocked by what's happening, they all jump at once. They jump at the same time and explode against the ground almost at the same time. And, again, that indescribable noise. Although much more intense.

That warm summer night in Madrid, ten people jump into the void from ten rooms on the seventh floor of the hotel that presides over the Plaza de España. None of them had checked in at reception. They do not carry anything to identify them. There is a young woman who will barely have turned thirty, but also someone over eighty. A corpse is wearing clothes worth more than six thousand euros. Another wears clothes that an NGO had given him. Their worlds have never crossed. They don't know each other. There is no guest or employee who remembers seeing them in the hotel, no personal item in the rooms from which they have jumped; although on the nightstand of number seven hundred and sixteen the investigators find a couple of lighted candles that seem to pray to a little virgin whom they gently illuminate. That's just the first of the surprises.

Quiet you are more beautiful

Light years away from the aforementioned books, and in tune with his reflection-oriented writing vocation, in this book Carme Chaparro offers his critical perspective on these so-called "demands" of modern life.

Impositions, formulas, impostures that end up being easy labels. Labels that, unfortunately, subjugate women more than men. There remains no other than to face a critical writing regarding so many aspects in which the customary or, on the contrary, the avant-garde, pose equally demands that invade very particular aspects.

There is no doubt that the current human being is located in a position of mere marketing target. But if it were only that disguised slavery ... Because as the author very well explains in many passages of the book, that harmful part of tendencies or customs made patterns that constrain freedoms, are soon assumed as values ​​that border on the moral and that hinder that need to vindication.

And precisely because of this, Carme ends up vindicating, raising awareness once more (because yes, we all know how slaves we are, but inertia is very dangerous towards alienation ...). So it does not hurt to take a tour of this book to disconnect and meditate on so many dangerous issues hovering over our society ...