The 3 best books by Mikel Santiago

The plethora of great authors rescued from self-publishing is gradually increasing. There is no better reference for leading publishers than the direct assessment of readers about an author who seeks his space from the ocean of self-publishing. And yes, it also happened with an author as established as Mikel Santiago.

Similar to other essential cases of noir or suspense such as Javier Castillo, Eva Garcia Saenz. Currently, all of them become the reference for many other authors who long ago stopped knocking on the saturated doors of large publishing houses to try to get their attention from the unanimous consideration of readers on online platforms.

But as I say, one of the most outstanding examples of this new culture of self-publishing towards success is undoubtedly that of Mikel Santiago. We are talking about one of those writers who, in addition to being well received by the reader's direct criticism, is discovered as a new voice that masterfully conducts his plots with an exhausting rhythm under an always opportune cadence of events, constantly generating new hooks and twists.

All this under a scenic and psychological setting typical of an author who knows how to perfectly transfer his imagination and his proposal to the other side, where the communicative magic of reading is generated under a kind of voice-over of the writer.

No wonder Mikel is one of our most international writers, compared even to Stephen King in that sublime capacity for the construction of absolutely empathetic characters and perfectly tangible situations around any of his black plots.

Top 3 recommended novels by Mikel Santiago

Among the dead

Usually occurs. The most unspeakable love delivered to the most fiery passion points to both life and death drives. There is no crime of passion without a sense of revenge, disagreement, spite or whatever moves such disparate characters in this novel. The shadow of El Cuervo flies over so many souls like a bad conscience that takes flesh, bones and shadows to collect his bills...

There are dead who never rest, and perhaps they should not until justice is served. Nobody knows this better than Nerea Arruti, an agent of the Ertzaintza in Illumbe, a lonely woman who also drags her own corpses and ghosts from the past.

A forbidden love story, a supposedly accidental death, a mansion overlooking the Bay of Biscay where everyone has something to hide, and a mysterious character known as the Raven whose name appears as a shadow throughout the novel. These are the ingredients of an investigation that will become more complicated page after page and in which Arruti, as readers will soon discover, will be much more than the agent in charge of the case.

Among the dead, Mikel Santiago

The liar

Excuse, defense, deception, pathology at worst. The lie is a strange space of coexistence of the human being, assuming our contradictory nature. And the lie can also be the most premeditated concealment. Bad business when it becomes imperative for us to hide reality for the survival of the construct of our world.

Much has been written about lying. Because treason is born from it, the worst secrets, even crime. Hence the reader magnetism towards this type of argument. So we start mentioning the bicha from the title of this novel by Mikel Santiago, impregnating the protagonist with the defect made essence of his being.

Only that in this case the lie accepts intriguing folds in this case, the double somersault of this novel adds a supervening amnesia to make everything rarer and prepare us to release so much tension that accumulates with each page.

From Shari lapena but also Federico Axat Going through many other writers, all of them pull from amnesia to offer us that play of light and shadow that suspense readers enjoy so much. But going back to “The Liar”…, what will he have to tell us about his great falsehood? Because logically the lie is the essence of suspense, of the thriller for which we move on the edge of suspicion of that great deception about to drop the curtain.

Michael Santiago he breaks the limits of psychological intrigue with a story that explores the fragile frontiers between memory and amnesia, truth and lies.

In the first scene, the protagonist wakes up in an abandoned factory next to the corpse of an unknown man and a stone with traces of blood. When he flees, he decides to try to piece together the facts himself. However, he has a problem: he barely remembers anything that happened in the last forty-eight hours. And what little he does know is better not to tell anyone.

This is how this starts thriller which takes us to a coastal town in the Basque Country, between winding roads on the edge of cliffs and houses with walls cracked by stormy nights: a small community where, only apparently, no one has secrets from anyone.

The liar, by Mikel Santiago

Tom Harvey's strange summer

The heavy thought that you have failed someone can be chilling in light of the fateful subsequent events. You may not be absolutely guilty that everything went so fucking wrong, but your omission proved fatal.

That is the perspective that surrounds the reader of this novel as soon as it begins with the first pages. A kind of indirect guilt, which could have been avoided if Tom had reached out to Bob Ardlan, his ex-father-in-law. Because shortly after that call Bob ended up slamming himself on the ground from the balcony of his house. But of course, Tom was flirting with a spectacular girl, or at least he was trying, and serving an ex-father in those circumstances was still embarrassing.

When I started reading this novel, I remembered the last works of Luca D'andrea, sandrone dazieri or Andrea Camilleri. And i thought this book "The Strange Case of Tom Harvey", by the mere fact of being developed in Italy, it was going to form a hodgepodge of these three authors of the same genre. Damn prejudices! Soon I understood that Mikel's is what a voice of its own and differentiated usually says. Although the black genre always offers shared winks, what Mikel achieves is a beautiful black literature, to call it somehow.

There is murder, there is conflict (inside and outside the character), there is investigation and mystery, but somehow, the way Mikel's characters move through their well-linked plot conveys a special beauty in an agile and precise verb that he knows how to fill in descriptions from the inside of the character to the outside and from the outside to the inside.

A kind of scene-character symbiosis that you may not have found in other authors. I do not know if I explain myself. What I am clear about is that, when in doubt, you cannot stop reading it.

Tom Harvey's strange summer

Other interesting books by Mikel Santiago ...

The forgotten son

Revenge is best served on a cold plate. Because they attack the victim in an unexpected, sibylline, tangential way. Secrets can then emerge among misty memories, perhaps not so true, probably not so destructive. But memory is what it is and memories can be capable of becoming a vital foundation towards revenge made justice.

There are people we leave behind, there are debts we never finish paying. Aitor Orizaola, "Ori", is an Ertzaintza agent in low hours. While he recovers at home from the violent resolution of his last case (and faces a disciplinary file) he receives bad news. His nephew Denis, who years ago was almost a son to him, has been accused of murder. But something smells rotten, and Ori, even down and sore, has some old dog tricks to figure out what's really going on.

The island of the last voices

An atmosphere that leads us to the remotest part of the old British kingdom, the last island in the vicinity of Saint Kilda, an authentic nature reserve in which residual tourism and the last fishermen coexist amid a silence only broken by the swellings of the North Sea. .

With that feeling of strangeness that open spaces offer us but away from all signs of civilization, we ran into Carmen, a hotel employee, a character stranded from her own destiny to those distant shores. Together with her, the few fishermen who understand that piece of land as their last place in the world face the storm that has led to the eviction of the island.

And there, all surrendered to the whim of a great storm, Carmen and the rest of the inhabitants will face a discovery that will transform their lives much more than the greatest of storms could have done.

The island of the last voices

In the middle of the night

A large cast of Spanish-language suspense authors seem to have conspired to give us no rest in readings that frantically lead us from one high-tension plot to another. Among Javier Castillo, Michael Santiago, Victor of the Tree o Dolores Redondo among others, they ensure that the options of dark stories very close to us never run out ... Now let's enjoy what always happens in the middle of the night, when we all sleep and evil slides like a shadow in search of lost souls ...

Can one night mark the fate of all who lived it? More than twenty years have passed since the declining rock star Diego Letamendia last performed in his hometown of Illumbe. That was the night of the end of his band and his group of friends, and also that of the disappearance of Lorea, his girlfriend. The police never managed to clarify what happened to the girl, who was seen rushing out of the concert hall, as if fleeing from something or someone. After that, Diego embarked on a successful solo career and never returned to town.

When one of the gang members dies in a strange fire, Diego decides to return to Illumbe. Many years have passed and the reunion with old friends is difficult: none of them is still the person they were. Meanwhile, suspicion grows that the fire was not accidental. Is it possible that everything is related and that, so long later, Diego can find new clues about what happened with Lorea?

Mikel Santiago settles once again in the imaginary town of the Basque Country, where his previous novel, The Liar, was already set, this story marked by a past that could have terrible consequences in the present. This masterful thriller envelops us in the nostalgia of the nineties as we unravel the mystery of that night that everyone struggles to forget.

In the middle of the night, by Mikel Santiago

The bad way

A second part can end up suspended from the original when its edition is reduced to inertia or opportunism. Likewise, the second novel by an author genuinely interested in gaining a trade and ending up giving his best, will end up shining above any great debut.

This second case is that of Mikel Santiago and his bad way, a novel in which we discover that there is always room for improvement. From a more realistic setting, Mikel takes the opportunity to make his new plot stand out even more. In addition, the novel also gains in rhythm to provide the set with addictive reading levels, with the echoes of the reading inviting you to retake a new chapter.

The writer Bert Amandale shares with his friend the musician Chucks Basil one of those trips with a flavor to nowhere, to old guilt and uncertain destinations, but what they would never imagine is that they would end up seeing themselves immersed in strange events that seem to be brought by a magnetic force, the one that leads a life towards total disaster.

The bad way
5/5 - (8 votes)

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