My generation of the 70s is already well supplied with Santiago Díaz. Because we include other great storytellers like John Gomez Jurado, Michael Santiago, Cesar Perez Gellida y Paul pen. All of them are writers of the purest suspense. Thrillers like big trucks. And in a way one enjoys them even more from the generational harmony to which I have appealed more than once. Because a shared imaginary serves the cause of the most natural hook and the understood nod to the first.
In the case of Santiago Diaz He joined the select group recently but has come up with that vision of the criminal clearly given over to the times, by spreading noir to all sides to build characters and changing, surprising plots. Stories with a disturbing disruptive point at times. Or spiraling around homicide as the theatrical consequence of common hatred. Perverse obsessions recorded for the criminal on duty as inescapable targets of sinister routines.
It is a very cinematographic literature, authentically developed in scenes that are inserted in the imagination as chapters of a successful black series. The problem is that its reading hooks from that strange reader morbid of all fans of the genre. And as expected, with capricious perversion, little or no good ends up finding in the characters in charge of translating the necessarily buried violence into fiction. That animosity capable of leading to the modus operandi of the most treacherous murderer or the search for a Machiavellian justice that reality deprives us of ...
Top recommended novels by Santiago Díaz
The good father (Indira Ramos 1)
We are approaching a series that aims at a large volume of the black genre in Spanish. Relying on his exhaustive knowledge of the tools necessary to maintain narrative tension (diversity of scripts behind his back is what he has), Díaz establishes in his protagonist Indira Ramos that epicenter around which the eye of the hurricane of every committed researcher is formed to discover the truth at any cost.
After receiving an alarm call, the police found a man stained with blood and a knife with his prints next to the corpse of his wife in a chalet in a Madrid urbanization. A year later, an old man turns himself in to the police claiming to be the kidnapper of three missing persons: his son's defense attorney, the judge who convicted him, and a young student who testified against him at trial.
Convinced that all three were bribed, the man assures that one will die every week until the real murderer of his daughter-in-law is arrested and his son is freed. Inspector Indira Ramos, whose ethics is as unshakable as her phobia of microbes, only has three weeks to resolve the case before "the good father" carries out his macabre plan.
The other girls
With that police aftertaste that Díaz imprints on this series but also delving into the most shocking of the criminal on duty, our heroine Indira Ramos will have to delve once again into the most ominous of our closest surroundings. We enter, with that disturbing morbidity that prevents us from taking our eyes off the sinister, in a new case with that touch of realism of the case of black Spain but seen from the deepest interiorities.
The inspector Indira Ramos hurries her last days of leave in a small municipality of Extremadura. When, after almost three years, the time comes for him to leave his retirement and return to his job in Madrid, he finds himself unable to face the sub-inspector Iván Moreno, from whom he hides a huge secret.
But both will have to work hand in hand again to solve the biggest criminal puzzle in the contemporary history of Spain: the fingerprints of the man who was for many years the most wanted man in the country have appeared at a gas station.
The brutal murder he committed has expired and the police no longer have reasons to keep the main suspect in custody, who has been living under a false identity for some time. But Inspector Ramos is convinced that a murderer like him has had to kill again, so she just needs to find a crime that doesn't go unpunished.
Talion
For Marta Aguilera, the time has come when the future is the least important. And someone without fear of what will happen, someone freed from the heavy consequences can finally undertake the revenge of good on an evil that has prevailed since time immemorial.
It is not that Marta Aguilera hangs up her superhero cape and dedicates herself to fight like David against Goliath. It is only to finally act in accordance with those good principles that are always projected on the horizon while it is discovered how exactly the opposite is done in the highest instances of power.
Marta has little time to go out through the front door of a world that has already outgrown her. Or at least she has outgrown the tumor that irrevocably threatens her cells. And that is when breathing becomes something more than the inertia of living. With each new inspiration, Marta feels indebted to that place called the world, from which she bids farewell with greater certainty at each new second.
From her mission in this life, which was none other than journalism, and facing even those who market with justice or who simply continue to believe that everyone deserves procedural guarantees, our heroine decides to apply the most efficient law, the one that Ultimately it was written to alleviate the evil of the victim to the same extent that he received it.
In a certain way Marta also avenges her own injustice, that of that tumor that shortens the term of her life to the ridiculous. But precisely from that defeat that awaits her, Marta will get the best of herself to tackle her lost causes, wrenching from them that assumed fatality that gave them, precisely, for lost.
Other recommended books by Santiago Díaz
Indira
Any arrival at the trilogy always points to the summit or at least to the flying goal. And to culminate a good series, nothing better than peeking into the abysses of the hero on duty, in this case an Indira located in the eye of the hurricane so that the events take place with the epicenter in the very soul of an inspector who reflects the eternal dilemmas epics as proofs towards salvation or perdition. Something that in the noir genre still has greater repercussions on the thresholds between life and death.
For Inspector Indira Ramos it has been a year full of events: she hunted down a monster that everyone thought was dead, she lost one of her best agents in an unfortunate accident and she had to choose between the two men in her life. But, when everything seemed to have returned to normal and a calm period was before her, life insists on making things more difficult than ever and she will have to face, together with inspector Iván Moreno, a case that will unite them or will separate forever.
His team - now made up of Deputy Inspector María Ortega, by an agent Lucía Navarro who is more taciturn than usual after her rehabilitation and by Jotadé, an officer of gypsy origin with unorthodox but effective methods who will turn the lives of his colleagues upside down - has to investigate the discovery of several bodies in a construction site. Nothing seems to unite the victims and only by investigating their past will they be able to understand why they have been killed one by one.
