The example of the writer Dolores Redondo It ends up being the dream of any budding writer. Dedicated to other professional tasks, Dolores always found that space for her little great stories that would end up leading to monumental works such as his Baztán trilogy… Origins like those of so many writers who find in literature a gratifying leisure as well as a stronghold of the dream of publication, recognition and glory.
The normal thing is that this form of leisure is parked in the personal sphere. But sometimes dreams do materialize. It is only necessary that in addition to writing, it has been read much before to learn, in addition to having enough imagination, the will to give continuity to the hobby, all seasoned with a few drops of self-criticism to win at the trade and voilà, you can end up being a recognized writer.
The last step is to be in the right place at the right time. And for that you already have to trust your luck or pray to your favorite saint. The point is that Dolores Redondo he came to stay thanks to his good work and to his narrative proposal whose shuttle is the Baztán trilogy. Dolores Redondo and Amaia Salazar they are already something indissoluble in the general reader's imaginary. But without a doubt there is more literary life outside Elizondo (and the one to come ...)
Top 3 best novels of Dolores Redondo
The north face of the heart
Let's start from the background of this novel. And it is that the tormented characters always tune in with that part of the reader that links them to their own past; with the errors or traumas that to a greater or lesser extent seem to intensely mark the fate of existence. Above good decisions and successful consequences.
In the end, everything is limited to the feeling of the peremptory, of the only opportunity to make decisions. Something that ultimately generates that existential weight of limited time.
It may sound too far-reaching to talk about the prequel to the triumphant Baztán saga de Dolores Redondo, that work that served to popularize the black genre with greater intensity if possible in Spain.
But it is that the character of Amaia Salazar left so many loose ends personally, so much juice on his childhood and youth dotted by the most disruptive events in the existential, that a return to the saga from the origins pointed without a doubt to all those looming shadows about the brilliant inspector.
We are located in 2005 and we soon recognize Aloisius Dupree, a researcher with whom Amaia contacted on occasion in the initial trilogy. He is in charge of conducting a meeting of police forces from around the world under the umbrella of the FBI in the city of Quantico, where the training department of this American body is based.
Amaia stands out greatly during the instruction and is included in the investigation of a real case. Its special connection with the modus operandi of criminal minds (which we could already guess in the trilogy) is manifested again here.
But her initiatory professional journey that immerses her fully in the case of the criminal known as "the composer" (for the most gruesome reasons we can imagine) is turned upside down when an imperative need demands her from her original Elizondo.
But Amaia is already embarked (never better said for a New Orleans practically submerged under the waters after the passage of that Hurricane Katrina), and leaves her most personal reality parked, suspended, stopped. The figure of her father moves her between contradictory feelings of defeat and residual love. Because it was he, Juan Salazar, who did not know how to save her from her deepest fears that have lasted until today.
Although it is true that Amaia and her traumas have an insurmountable destiny, I don't know. And that especially connects her to Dupree, her head of research in the United States. Because he, too, has gone through his particular hells, more gruesome if possible, in the American way, where everything always seems bigger.
The plot advances with several open fronts, from the now remote Elizondo to a ghostly city like New Orleans, dark and suffocating between the total sinister of Katrina and its esoteric heritage.
Because beyond the murderer nicknamed as the composer, the hecatomb of the hurricane seems to remove everything until it reaches the crossed existences of Amaia and Dupree. Without the composer really being considered as a supporting actor, new issues from the past emerge from the rising waters, like nightmares that the great hurricane has been in charge of recovering to unhinge the reader in a constant change of frantic scenarios.
"The Story of Man is the story of his fears anywhere in the world", something like this Dupree manages to assure in some of the scenes of this novel, confirming it at the precise moment in which the plot equates Elizondo and New Orleans.
Shadow characters, witchcraft, voodoo, natural disasters. A narrative proposal that advances under the symphony of a sinister violin capable of evoking so many pending issues on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean ... The ecstasy of the crime novel is looming like a horizon that prevents you from stopping reading.
A total noir novel, with flashes of terror even that brings us even closer to that great character who is already Amaia Salazar. She is now only 25 years old but she already draws that determination of the inspector that she will become.
Except that the shadow generated from the deep forests of her heart, like a telluric force that links her to Baztán, continues to awaken the same chills of chill of those who try to escape from fears. And curiously, in that fear lies his extraordinary capacity for investigation. Because she is the needle in the haystack ...
The invisible guardian
There are many black novels. Some hook you more and others less. This one in particular doesn't hook you, it just grabs you. Although here below I attach the link to the Baztán trilogy complete, in my opinion its first installment was the best (ignoring the aforementioned masterful prequel that already falls off quite a bit as far as location is concerned)
What to say about Amaia Salazar? In a presentation to use for this first installment, it could be said that she is a police inspector who returns to her hometown, Elizondo, to try to solve a lurid case of serial murders, a protagonist with obvious weaknesses but with a tested psyche bombs or even baker's sticks ...)
Teenage girls in the area are the killer's main target. As the plot progresses, we discover Amaia's dark past, the same one that has her plunged into a personal anxiety that she hides through her impeccable police performance.
But there comes a time when everything explodes into the air, linking the case itself with the inspector's stormy past ... Impeccable plot, at the height of the best detective novels.
I read it during a convalescence and I find it fascinating how the author managed to immerse me fully in the story from page 1, completely abstracting myself from time (you already know that lying in bed due to any ailment, that is what is most appreciated about reading, the light and entertaining passage of the hours).
waiting for the flood
Analyzing it in detail from all ends, the idea is perfect. The storms with their resounding awakening, the thunder, lightning and lightning as vestiges of the remote fears that assailed humans in the past and that today remain as perfect symbols and metaphors. Dolores Redondo he collects them all in his narrative repertoire to hide the blue sky with the black nebulous shadows of uncertainty.
Every psyche shaped for evil inhabits those storms. Along with the old myths and legends of beings that appeared just when the heavens seemed to close, overwhelming souls like the end of the world.
That is what the protagonist of this story suspects, an end of the world that stalks him on all sides. Because he has a short time to live and his only mission is to discover the elusive Bible John. From Glasgow to Bilbao (if the two cities are not the same according to the impressions of John Biblia and his persecutor, police investigator Noah Scott Sherrington).
Arriving in Bilbao, shortly before its big festivals, the descriptions of Dolores Redondo they are brushed with precision, offering us disparate glimpses of the city and precious portraits of its inhabitants. A magnificent human setting that brings us closer to a city that can hardly imagine the storm that is coming its way, when Bible John discovers the sign that prompts him to act again...
On this occasion, the role of Bilbao is at the level of the murderer or the policeman. The city takes on its own personality, lives, beats between the weakened hunches of the policeman with renewed instinct, almost magical after returning from the dead. Bilbao is someone else, its streets replicate, they almost dialogue with the characters at every moment. Undoubtedly Dolores Redondo he excels in this story in that aspect that structures the plot and that does something much better than staging it perfectly. I dare not say more and let the official synopsis be the one that invites you to start a trip to the most disturbing Bilbao...
Between 1968 and 1969, the murderer the press would call Bible John killed three women in Glasgow. He was never identified and the case is still ongoing today. In this novel, in the early 1983s, Scottish police investigator Noah Scott Sherrington manages to get to Bible John, but a last-minute failure of his heart prevents him from arresting him. Despite his fragile state of health, and against medical advice and the refusal of his superiors to continue his pursuit of the serial killer, Noah follows a hunch that will lead him to Bilbao in XNUMX. Just a few days before he a veritable flood devastated the city.
Other recommended books dolores redondo...
All this I will give you
Leaving the dark forests of Baztán fascinated and discovering the light of another great novel ends up confirming the worth of an author always capable of surprising. (This link includes a curious booklet of the work). Manuel takes over from Amaia Salazar. Nothing to do with each other.
The plot does not progress through an official police investigation. The circumstances in which Álvaro dies do not arouse suspicions that deserve to be investigated, or at least it seems that at first. But Manuel needs to know what happened on the strange trip that his beloved Álvaro hid from him.
The question is to guess how far the power of Álvaro's family environment reaches to convince everyone of the accidentalness of the case and if so, if Álvaro's family governs the destinies of that remote part of the world to such an extent, what can happen with a Manuel determined to know the truth about his partner?
Impunity, the term repeatedly adopted by Dolores Redondo, presents us with the realities of remote places where rules prevail above any law, based on customs and privileges. Places where silences hide great secrets, defended at all costs.
The privileges of the angel
Would you like to meet the writer who has not yet risen to fame? There is always something genuine in any work prior to the great overall impact of a creator. What's more, in this novel you will not find anything that resembles what has been written since the first Baztán novel.
And yet you will end up enjoying a great novel, perhaps the one that caused a great label to notice it. Childhood, friendship and death. The first person to get closer as privileged viewers to a story that has everything emotional and in the action itself.
A novel that also addresses the existential as something paradoxical, contradictory. Happiness and trauma, debts that can never be paid with childhood, guilt and the feeling that the future tense is completely worn out and expired.
What is the best novel in the baztán series?
In "The north face of the heart" we enjoy a compendium between present and past of the researcher Amaia Salazar. A fascinating prequel that appeared in fourth place after the Baztán trilogy and that fascinates due to its framework loaded with maximum tension on both sides of the Atlantic.