THRILLER

Crisis, corruption and writing: two political novels by J. A. Puig

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Leviathan’s hour y Coastal Passage They approach politics from almost opposite scales. The first unfolds an extensive plot of mafias, financial scandals and influence peddling; The second observes the daily life of an individual divided between his obligations and writing. Together they allow us to read the crisis not only as an institutional issue, but also as an experience that transforms consciousness and language.

Two scales of the crisis

The political novel can represent parliaments, parties and big decisions, but also the less visible effects of power: precariousness, frustration, self-deception and loss of horizons. These two works work on these levels in a complementary way. One enlarges the map; the other reduces the field until it follows the movements of a consciousness.

This is not to say that every novel about corruption is a document nor that every novel of introspection is autobiographical. Fiction selects, combines and deforms social materials to construct a readable experience. Its critical value depends on this elaboration, not on an immediate equivalence with real people or cases.

Leviathan’s hour: economic power, crime and social representation

The work builds a broad set of characters to represent the world that produced a financial and social crisis. The recognizable inspiration in cases of corruption and operations against organized crime provides a contemporary point of support, but the plot is not limited to reconstructing a file. Mafias, finance, police, media and political interests form a network in which each actor has only part of the information.

The title refers to the figure of sovereign power, although the novel shows dispersed power. Decisions do not come from a single center: they circulate between legal and illegal organizations, capital, favors and public stories. This structure explains its crossover between genres. It is a political novel for its object, black for its criminal mechanisms and thriller for risk and information management.

The author’s blog offers a synopsis of the novel and also preserve the work in your literary archive. These materials help to situate its purpose and its development without replacing reading the volume.

Available editions: see Leviathan’s hour in Bubok, consult the digital edition on Smashwords, see all digital bookstores available on Books2Read o check the ebook on Kobo.

Coastal Passage: writing and everyday wear

Cabotage is navigation close to the coast, made of limited routes and close references. The metaphor allows us to describe Guillermo Trilla’s existence, which oscillates between daily duty and the need to write. Faced with the choral amplitude of Leviathan’s hour, this novel adopts a biographical and psychological scale.

The character’s frustration is not presented as a purely private problem. Their routines, their relationship with work, and their literary aspirations are conditioned by a social environment that measures time, usefulness, and success. Satire arises from the distance between the great speeches with which a life is explained and the modest maneuvers with which that life manages to continue.

Writing plays an ambivalent function. It offers a form of resistance and order, but it can also become a refuge, a reprieve, or a fiction about oneself. Memory turns to the page and, in doing so, ceases to be an innocent record. A recipient is selected, composed and acquired.

English edition — Coastal Passage: choose an ebook retailer on Books2Read. Paperback in English: ThriftBooks, Readings or IBS (ISBN 9798237359855, 112 pages). Retailer availability and delivery vary by country.

From the power network to individual conscience

Read together, the novels avoid two common simplifications. The first would be to reduce corruption to the exceptional conduct of a few individuals; Leviathan’s hour insists on the networks that allow and normalize these behaviors. The second would consist of considering personal discomfort outside of social organization; Coastal Passage shows how collective rhythms penetrate intimacy.

They also share a concern for the stories a society tells about itself. In the criminal plot, these stories take the form of official versions, news and alibis. In Guillermo Trilla’s novel, they appear as memories and writing projects. Politics thus becomes a problem of language: who can impose an explanation, what is left out of it, and how fiction makes that exclusion visible.

What reading to choose

Leviathan’s hour It is especially aimed at those looking for an extensive, choral narrative close to the thriller political. Coastal Passage proposes a more concentrated, ironic and introspective experience. They are not equivalent works, but they are two compatible approaches to the link between power, crisis and representation.

The complete catalog can be explored at Loft Library in Payhip, he bubok profile and the J. A. Puig profile on Smashwords.

Automatic translation of the original article. The language of this page does not determine the language of the book: purchase links lead to the editions indicated, including editions in their original language.

From police procedure to the fantastic: three novels of unstable reality

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Criminal investigation often promises that one method—observation, interrogation, testing—will restore order. In The mysterious candor of trains, The irresolvable dilemma of Augusto Negroponte y You Are Here with Me, that promise comes under pressure. The three novels start from a recognizable enigma, but introduce fissures that force us to distinguish between discovering what happened and understanding it.

A shared territory: the inspector and the city

Two of the novels incorporate inspector Néstor Páramo and the fictional city of Sajará. This continuity does not make them identical episodes: the character acts as a point of comparison between cases in which police logic encounters different forms of uncertainty. The researcher’s repetition reinforces a central question: what can a research establish when reality seems to obey more than one system of causes?

In Alba Longa we have also discussed the way in which a story manages information in «The unreliable narrator: how fiction manipulates the reader». These novels do not necessarily rely on a deceptive narrator, but they do exploit the distance between events, characters’ interpretations, and the reader’s expectations.

The mysterious candor of trains: two investigations and a convergence

The novel opens two criminal lines separated by the Atlantic. Two poisoned corpses appear in a mansion located on a Mediterranean cliff. In Buenos Aires, a series of murders leads to the area around the Retiro station and links to the memory of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The interest of the structure lies in the gradual convergence of both investigations.

The train fulfills a broader function than just an environmental reason. Seasons, displacements and connections allow us to articulate distant spaces, unresolved pasts and lives that only seem independent. The result combines police procedure, international crime and historical memory without reducing one dimension to the decoration of the other.

Alba Longa published a first approximation of the argument in «The mysterious candor of trains (recommended reading)»; The author’s blog also allows you to read a fragment of the work.

Available editions: see the novel on Bubok, consult the digital edition on Smashwords o buy the ebook at Apple Books.

The irresolvable dilemma of Augusto Negroponte: knowing is not equivalent to testing

The premise introduces an effective inversion of the classic enigma: the police know the identity of the murderer and his way of acting, but lack sufficient evidence. The uncertainty does not initially fall on the “who”, but on the possibility of converting knowledge into demonstration. When the suspect is arrested, the problem, far from being closed, takes on a stranger dimension.

The novel uses the framework of thriller psychological and research story to explore the relationship between words, consciousness and reality. Its metafictional component shifts the center from the judicial resolution to the conditions that make a story intelligible. Hence the “dilemma” of the title is not only police.

Available editions: see The irresolvable dilemma of Augusto Negroponte in Bubok, consult the digital edition on Smashwords, buy the ebook at Apple Books o check it out on Kobo.

You Are Here with Me: from the criminal scenario to the fantastic

A writer specialized in 18th century literature appears dead in his office. The scene initially suggests suicide, but Néstor Páramo’s intervention opens up other possibilities. The starting point belongs to the private room mystery and the forensic investigation; Its development incorporates gothic, ghostly and altered reality elements.

The victim’s profession is not accidental. Books, literary tradition and the persistence of the past intervene in the construction of the enigma. The novel makes the police question—what happened in that room—coexist with another less verifiable question: what kind of presence a life can leave in the texts and in those who read them. The author offers a synopsis and a first chapter on his blog.

English edition — You Are Here with Me: choose an ebook retailer on Books2Read. Paperback in English: AbeBooks or IBS (ISBN 9798237209815, 94 pages). Retailer availability and delivery vary by country.

Three variations on the limits of the method

The three works can be read as variations on the same tension. The mysterious candor of trains expands research through geographic and historical connections; Augusto Negroponte separates certainty from proof; You Are Here with Me The police method faces evidence that borders on the supernatural. In each case, the genre provides recognizable rules, and the narrative draws its energy from showing where they fail.

The entire catalog can be consulted at Loft Library in Payhip, in it bubok profile and in the J. A. Puig profile on Smashwords.

Automatic translation of the original article. The language of this page does not determine the language of the book: purchase links lead to the editions indicated, including editions in their original language.

The Architecture of Crime: Why Crime Fiction Is Really an Art of Knowledge

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In brief: crime fiction is an architecture of knowledge in which clues, concealment and points of view determine what the detective, the reader and the narrator can know.

How crime fiction organizes knowledge

Crime fiction seems, at first glance, to be a literature of events. A body is discovered. Someone disappears. A lie is exposed. A detective begins to ask questions. Yet the event itself is only the visible entrance to a more complicated structure. The real material of crime fiction is knowledge: who possesses it, who withholds it, who misreads it, and how long the reader can remain suspended between competing versions of the truth.

This is why the most enduring crime novels cannot be reduced to the question of who committed the crime. The identity of the culprit may matter enormously, but it is only one component in a larger architecture. A crime novel must decide what happened before the first page, what traces that hidden history left behind, who can perceive those traces, and what assumptions will prevent both characters and readers from understanding them too soon. In other words, crime fiction is not merely a literature of concealment. It is a literature of controlled revelation.

That distinction changes the way we read the genre. A clue is no longer simply an object placed in the narrative for the detective to find. It is a relationship between a sign and an interpretation. A footprint, a message, a missing object, or an unusual silence becomes significant only when someone asks the right question. The same clue can therefore support several hypotheses before its true meaning becomes legible. The craft lies not in hiding the truth outside the reader’s reach, but in placing it within view while surrounding it with plausible alternative explanations.

The best crime fiction has always understood this, even when it lacked the terminology later supplied by narratology. Concepts such as focalization, narrative order, duration, frequency, unreliability, and polyphony allow us to describe with precision what writers have long achieved intuitively. Who sees a scene? Who knows more? Who is wrong? What information belongs to the narrator, and what belongs only to the focal character? When does the past enter the present? How many times is the same event retold, and why does each version change its meaning?

These questions become especially important in twenty-first-century crime fiction because the genre has moved far beyond a single model. The classical puzzle remains alive, but it now coexists with psychological thrillers, domestic noir, historical crime fiction, eco-noir, transnational narratives, political thrillers, rural noir, speculative mysteries, and novels that stand deliberately on the border between crime fiction and so-called literary fiction. The result is not the disappearance of genre, but its expansion.

A writer such as Keigo Higashino can reveal the culprit early and move the true mystery elsewhere: toward method, proof, sacrifice, or the hidden premise governing the investigation. Tana French can turn the detective’s consciousness into part of the case, making personal desire and traumatic memory interfere with professional perception. Gillian Flynn can make narration itself into a criminal action, showing how diaries, media performances, and competing versions become instruments of power. Leonardo Padura can use an individual investigation to excavate history, disillusionment, and the memory of a city. Don Winslow can expand criminal causality until the antagonist is no longer a single person but a network connecting money, institutions, political decisions, and violence.

What unites such different writers is not a formula. It is an awareness that crime produces an epistemological crisis. Something has happened, but its meaning is not yet available. The novel must construct the path from the event to its interpretation. That path is the architecture of crime.

Narrative time is one of the principal materials of that architecture. Crimes generally belong to the past; investigations unfold in the present. The novel moves forward while searching backward. This double temporality gives the genre its distinctive energy. Analepsis, testimony, recovered documents, altered memories, and retrospective revelations gradually reconstruct what can no longer be witnessed directly. At the same time, present danger may continue to evolve, turning curiosity about the past into suspense about the future.

Suspense itself becomes more precise when we stop treating it as a vague synonym for excitement. Curiosity asks what happened. Suspense asks what will happen. Anticipatory dread begins when a feared possibility starts to feel almost present before it occurs. A sophisticated crime novel can move among all three modes. It can make us investigate an old death, fear a new one, and watch a character move toward danger that we understand better than they do.

Point of view is equally decisive. Choosing a perspective is not merely a way of controlling information; it is also an ethical decision. To narrate through the perpetrator can produce disturbing intimacy and temporary complicity. To remain with the investigator can reduce victims to evidence unless the novel restores their individuality. To enter the victim’s consciousness may resist objectification, but it can also expose suffering to a voyeuristic gaze. There is no morally neutral perspective. Every focalization distributes attention, sympathy, opacity, and power.

This is why contemporary crime fiction is often at its strongest when it refuses the comforting equivalence between truth and repair. A case can be solved and still leave injustice behind. The guilty person may be identified while the institution that protected them remains intact. The victim may receive a name without receiving life back. A family may learn what happened and discover that knowledge itself has consequences. The ending therefore has to distinguish plot closure from moral closure, legal closure from emotional closure, and truth from reparation.

Such distinctions matter not only to critics but also to writers. Anyone planning a crime novel must eventually answer a surprisingly concrete series of questions. What exactly happened before the story begins? What did the perpetrator intend, and where did the plan fail? What did the victim want before becoming a victim? What does each suspect know, believe, and conceal? Which clue will first support the wrong interpretation and later become decisive under the right one? Why does the protagonist misread the case, and what personal or institutional bias makes that error plausible?

These are compositional questions, but they are also questions about meaning. A twist has no lasting value if it merely exchanges one culprit for another. Its real power lies in retrospective transformation: after the revelation, earlier scenes should remain true while becoming newly legible. The reader should not feel that the novel changed the rules. The reader should feel that the same facts have entered a more powerful relationship.

This is also the principle behind fair play. Fairness does not mean that the reader must be capable of solving every case before the detective. It means that the decisive explanation must arise from material the narrative has legitimately made available. A surprising solution can be difficult, even nearly impossible to foresee, and still feel fair if rereading reveals that its causes were present all along.

The architecture becomes still more complex when crime fiction turns toward society. A murder may be committed by one person, but the conditions that made it possible may include class inequality, racism, gendered violence, corporate power, political corruption, historical trauma, or institutional indifference. Social crime fiction is most persuasive when these forces do not appear as speeches added to the plot, but as elements of causality. Who is believed? Who receives police attention? Who has access to lawyers, information, transportation, money, or safe space? Which deaths become public crises, and which disappear into administrative silence?

Once crime fiction begins to ask such questions, the genre becomes a form of social anatomy. Investigation links spaces and institutions that ordinary life keeps separate. It moves from private homes to police files, from bodies to financial records, from family memory to political history. The detective’s route becomes a way of reading a society.

Yet the genre’s international expansion makes any single model increasingly inadequate. Nordic noir cannot be reduced to snow and melancholy; Latin American crime fiction cannot be reduced to corruption; Japanese mystery cannot be reduced to logical puzzles; African crime fiction cannot be treated merely as an illustration of political instability. Every tradition transforms the concepts of law, evidence, community, victimhood, authority, and justice according to its own history. Translation does not simply carry stories across languages. It changes the map of the genre itself.

That international and theoretical breadth is the foundation of The Architecture of Crime. The book treats crime fiction as a serious narrative form whose technical sophistication deserves the same analytical precision applied to any major literary tradition. At the same time, it refuses to separate theory from practice. Narratological concepts matter because they allow us to see choices: why a scene is focalized through one character rather than another, why an event is delayed, why a clue works, why a confession fails, why a final twist feels inevitable or fraudulent.

The aim is therefore neither to impose a formula nor to celebrate complexity for its own sake. The aim is to understand necessity. A good crime novel is not one that accumulates twists, narrators, timelines, and secrets. It is one in which those elements form a system: the point of view determines what can be known; the chronology controls when it can be understood; characterization determines which interpretation will seem plausible; space determines what actions are possible; and the ending forces the reader to remember the entire narrative differently.

When that system works, the architecture becomes almost invisible. We feel suspense rather than seeing information management. We experience surprise rather than noticing structural preparation. We believe the characters are choosing freely even though the writer has built the causal conditions that make those choices coherent. This apparent naturalness is one of the highest achievements of narrative craft.

Crime fiction begins with a disturbance, but its deepest subject is what human beings do when reality no longer fits the story they believed. Investigation is the attempt to build a new story from what remains: traces, memories, bodies, documents, lies, silences, and consequences. The solution matters because it reorganizes those fragments. But the best novels know that something always remains outside the solution.

That remainder is where crime fiction becomes more than a puzzle. Truth can identify responsibility, but it cannot undo the act. Justice can impose consequences, but it cannot restore a lost life. Narrative can recover a victim’s history, but it cannot erase absence. What remains after the truth is therefore not a failure of the genre. It is the point at which the genre recognizes the full gravity of what it has been investigating.

The architecture of crime is ultimately the architecture of that journey: from appearance to causality, from suspicion to knowledge, from knowledge to judgment, and from judgment to the recognition that understanding and repair are not the same thing. That is why crime fiction remains one of the most adaptable and intellectually powerful narrative forms of our time.

For a fuller account of structure, clues, focalization and knowledge in crime fiction, continue with The Architecture of Crime.

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The Seven Dials Mystery: clocks, conspiracies and murder in Agatha Christie’s England

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In brief: The Seven Dials Mystery combines conspiracy, misleading clues and social comedy, with Bundle Brent progressively taking control of the investigation.

Clues, conspiracy and Bundle Brent

First published in 1929, The Seven Dials Mystery is one of Agatha Christie’s most spirited and unconventional novels: a dazzling combination of country-house mystery, political intrigue, secret societies and sophisticated comedy. Beginning with an apparently harmless practical joke, the story soon descends into a dangerous world of concealed identities, international secrets and murder, where every clue may have been deliberately placed to mislead and every respectable appearance may conceal a darker purpose.

The novel opens at Chimneys, the magnificent country estate already familiar to readers of The Secret of Chimneys. A lively group of young people has gathered there, and one of the guests, Gerald Wade, has acquired an unfortunate reputation for sleeping late. His friends decide to play a prank on him by placing eight alarm clocks in his bedroom, all set to ring at different times the following morning. Yet the joke ends in tragedy when Wade is discovered dead. Even more disturbing is the fact that only seven clocks remain, arranged with a deliberation that suggests something far more sinister than an accidental death.

What initially appears to be an inexplicable private tragedy gradually reveals the outlines of a much larger conspiracy. A mysterious reference to “Seven Dials,” a cryptic letter and the shadow of a clandestine organisation draw the principal characters away from the apparent tranquillity of English country life and into a labyrinth of espionage, political secrets and mortal danger. Behind closed doors, respectable gentlemen discuss matters of national importance; elsewhere, unknown figures gather in secrecy beneath the symbolic faces of seven clocks. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the distinction between amateur adventure and genuine peril rapidly disappears.

At the centre of the investigation is Lady Eileen Brent, universally known as “Bundle,” one of Christie’s most engaging heroines. Intelligent, courageous, impulsive and equipped with an irrepressible sense of humour, Bundle refuses to remain a passive observer. Her curiosity leads her into situations of increasing danger, but her determination and instinct make her a formidable investigator. Accompanied by the amiable and resourceful Bill Eversleigh, she attempts to uncover the truth behind the deaths and to identify the real purpose of the Seven Dials organisation.

Bundle belongs to a generation transformed by the aftermath of the First World War. Independent and impatient with convention, she drives fast cars, asks uncomfortable questions and enters spaces from which a more traditional heroine might have been excluded. Through her, Christie brings vitality and modernity to the familiar landscape of the English country-house mystery. Bundle’s audacity gives the novel much of its momentum, while her wit prevents the increasingly ominous plot from losing its lightness and charm.

The Seven Dials Mystery differs in tone and structure from the more methodical investigations associated with Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is not merely a puzzle constructed around a closed circle of suspects; it is also an adventure thriller, filled with secret meetings, stolen documents, coded messages, political manoeuvres and sudden reversals. Christie moves confidently between drawing rooms, country estates, government offices and hidden chambers, transforming the ordered surface of British society into a theatrical world of masks and concealed loyalties.

Yet beneath its pace and humour lies a carefully constructed mystery. Christie repeatedly invites the reader to draw conclusions from appearances, only to reveal how easily appearances can be manipulated. The seven clocks are at once a clue, a symbol and an instrument of deception. Characters seem to occupy familiar roles—the foolish young man, the mysterious foreigner, the dignified politician, the adventurous aristocrat—but these roles cannot always be trusted. The novel’s central pleasure lies in watching Christie rearrange the meaning of events until the apparently obvious interpretation becomes the least reliable one.

The story also offers a vivid portrait of Britain between the wars. The old aristocratic world still survives in country houses such as Chimneys, but it now coexists with motorcars, modern young women, international diplomacy and anxieties about political instability. Christie observes this changing society with affectionate irony. Her aristocrats may be eccentric, her politicians guarded and her young adventurers occasionally reckless, but each contributes to a social comedy that remains inseparable from the mystery itself.

Suspenseful, witty and rich in atmosphere, The Seven Dials Mystery displays a more adventurous side of Agatha Christie’s imagination. It retains the ingenious misdirection and surprising revelations expected of the Queen of Crime while embracing the energy of the espionage thriller. The result is a novel in which a bedroom prank becomes the entrance to a hidden world, seven ordinary clocks acquire a threatening significance, and an intrepid young woman discovers that curiosity may be as dangerous as it is irresistible.

For readers who enjoy classic British mysteries, secret societies, country-house intrigue and bold amateur detectives, The Seven Dials Mystery offers an irresistible journey into a world where danger waits behind the most respectable doors—and where the final truth may overturn everything that has gone before.

Return to Agatha Christie’s complete novel in the format that suits your reading.

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The Geneva Conspirator: the novel that reveals what no one dares to tell

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How far would you be willing to go to discover the truth? The Geneva Conspirator It is not just a novel: it is a journey to the very heart of the conspiracies that marked the recent history of France. The Clearstream, elf, Taiwan frigates and rhodia cases left behind a trail of political intrigues, financial maneuvers and scandals that even today continue to resonate in the courts and in the headlines.

Inspired by this real magma, the novel builds a relentless thriller in which bankers, ministers and executives play a game without rules. Paul Reitzenstein, heir to a financial dynasty, becomes the epicenter of a fierce struggle where nothing is what it seems and each alliance covers up a betrayal. Secret meetings at midnight, missing files, fortunes that change hands in a matter of hours: the reader advances page after page with the feeling of witnessing a forbidden secret.

What differentiates The Geneva Conspirator from other novels of the genre is its style. With powerful images and a rhythm that combines the tension of a thriller with literary density, the author makes Lake Geneva, carpeted offices and guarded mansions become characters in their own right. It is not just a story of power: it is a sensory experience that surrounds the reader in an environment of constant suspicion.

If you enjoy novels where political suspense is mixed with the psychological portrait of complex characters, The Geneva Conspirator is your next essential read. A work that reminds us that, on the border between truth and lies, there is always someone willing to pull the strings.

Are you ready to delve into the conspiracy?

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Automatic translation of the original article. The language of this page does not determine the language of the book: purchase links lead to the editions indicated, including editions in their original language.

YOU ARE HERE, WITH ME.

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A corpse in Sajará: literature, mystery and social criticism in a singular novel

In the small and fictitious municipality of Sajará, near the Mediterranean, opens a story that moves between detective novels, literary reflection and social criticism. The story begins with a disturbing discovery: a writer, a self-taught specialist in 18th century literature, appears dead in his office. It is the cleaning employee who discovers the body.

The inspector Nestor Paramo takes charge of the investigation. Everything points, according to the forensic team, to a suicide. However, routine police protocol requires that nothing be taken for granted. Through Páramo, the reader will gradually get to know both the deceased writer and a young Russian woman of extraordinary beauty, in charge of cleaning, whose figure will become the key to the story.

A life between erudition and isolation

The deceased was not a typical academic. He never attended university, gave interviews, or participated in conferences. It was a radical self-taught and solitary, which, from the closure of an old family mansion, made its way to becoming an international reference in the study of the Hispanic Enlightenment. His misanthropy and extreme seclusion made him an enigmatic, almost ghostly character.

In the central chapters, a flashback returns the voice to the writer himself. The reader then discovers an existence marked by two burdens: one visible physical deformity and, even more disturbing, the conviction – supported by disturbing facts – of being the bearer of a fulminating “evil eye”, which strikes with death those who hurt or reject it. For a cultured, rationalist and knowledgeable man of the Enlightenment, admitting such superstition is unacceptable; but the accumulation of events seems to point to the opposite.

The clash with beauty

The precarious balance of his inner world is broken with the unexpected arrival of Lizavetta, a young Russian woman who temporarily replaces the sick old housekeeper. The girl, endowed with exceptional beauty, embodies for him both threat and attraction.

The writer knows that, if she were to express the slightest gesture of disgust towards his figure, it could be her death sentence. Hence an obsessive dilemma arises: Protecting her means hiding at all costs. The story then becomes a game of light and shadow within the mansion, where each frustrated encounter increases the narrative tension.

A city, a mansion, an atmosphere

The ruined family house, described as a ship stranded in the shadows, becomes a setting loaded with symbolism. It is a dual space: on the one hand, dark, gloomy and closed; on the other, fleetingly crossed by flashes of light that embody the possibility of redemption.

The town of Sajará, with its superstitions, its land-based social hierarchy and a still archaic ideological background, stands as a critical microcosm of the Spanish deep province, where traditional power structures and mentalities persist.

The inspector's return

The last chapter returns the reader to the present of the investigation. Inspector Páramo, always attentive to appearances, harbors doubts about Lizavetta. However, the emergence of a notary changes the course of the case. However, the true outcome is found a few lines below, in a open ending that directly challenges the reader.

The work does not close with definitive answers, but with the demand that the recipient himself become a judge, completing the meaning of the story.

A novel to read calmly

This novel is not only a police intrigue. It is also a psychological and social exploration, a meditation on loneliness, deformity, the devastating power of superstition and the latent violence in closed communities.

His style privileges show before tell, with an abundance of tense dialogue and scenes full of atmosphere. The narrative alternates perspectives—the inspector, the writer, the young Russian woman—to offer the reader a rich and suggestive mosaic.

Why read it

  • Because it combines the best of crime novels with literary introspection.
  • Because it questions the border between enlightened reason and ancestral superstition.
  • Because it presents deeply human, contradictory and memorable characters.
  • Because, when closing the book, the reader is left with the final question, forced to reflect and reconstruct the plot in his mind.

📖 Discover the novel

If you are looking for an intense reading, join the police mystery, the social criticism and the literature of ideas, this work is for you.

👉 Buy the novel here

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Automatic translation of the original article. The language of this page does not determine the language of the book: purchase links lead to the editions indicated, including editions in their original language.

Carolingian councils, theological disputes

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Historical fiction, when written with rigor, does not simply recreate the atmosphere of a bygone age; it reopens the debates, anxieties, and contradictions that defined it. This novel, set in the year 797, situates its action on the eve of Charlemagne’s imperial coronation by Pope Leo III—a moment that would inaugurate the renovatio imperii and the symbolic rebirth of the Western Roman Empire. At that time, the Frankish monarch was not merely a warlord but the supreme protector of Christendom, his political project inseparable from the theological consolidation of the Latin Church. Yet the narrative refuses to remain at the level of palaces and synods. It unfolds instead within a German abbey, a liminal space where empire, theology, and clandestine ambition converge.

At the center of the intrigue is a mysterious object, concealed by the aged Ramiro, a Spanish exile whose reputation as a magus evokes both the persistence of Visigothic erudition and the transmission of esoteric traditions from al-Andalus. The death of this centenarian custodian unleashes a struggle within the abbey’s walls, where spies of competing powers attempt to seize the relic. These clandestine conflicts mirror, in microcosm, the broader fractures of the Carolingian world: between Frankish authority and local autonomies, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between the universal aspirations of empire and the centrifugal realities of human ambition.

The monastic setting is more than a backdrop; it embodies the intellectual ferment of the Carolingian Renaissance. One recalls the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne and his advisors, including Alcuin of York and Theodulf of Orléans, condemned the Adoptionist heresy emanating from Spain and rejected the decrees of the Second Council of Nicaea on the veneration of images. Such disputes find their echo in the novel’s theological conversations, where monks wrestle with the mystery of the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and the boundaries between orthodoxy and superstition. The novel thus situates itself at the intersection of the great Carolingian debates, where theology was never a purely speculative matter but an issue of political survival and ecclesiastical unity.

The missi dominici, imperial envoys who appear within the story, remind the reader of the administrative reforms by which Charlemagne sought to impose order across his vast dominions. Their presence in the abbey dramatizes the reality that no monastic community could remain isolated from the machinery of empire. In this respect, the abbey becomes a microcosm of Carolingian governance: a place where law, faith, and power collide, and where loyalty to the emperor must coexist with obedience to the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Stylistically, the prose alternates between lyrical evocation—landscapes of November forests, frozen rivers, and cloisters resonant with whispered conspiracies—and scholastic disputation, where children and monks alike grapple with metaphysical questions. The dialogues are not ornamental but function as windows into the intellectual universe of the early Middle Ages, when categories such as justice, heresy, and power were debated with a gravity that could determine both salvation and political legitimacy.

The motif of the hidden relic, lethal to those who attempt to wield it without comprehension, resonates with Augustinian theology. In De civitate Dei (Book XIX), Augustine insists that power, divorced from justice, becomes nothing more than organized brigandage. The novel dramatizes this principle: each character who seeks to seize the relic for self-interest meets an abrupt and terrible end, while only Bernardo, the innocent novice, succeeds in deciphering its enigma. Here the narrative suggests that true authority, far from being reducible to possession, requires purity of intention and alignment with higher truths.

In its interweaving of espionage, theology, and monastic daily life, the novel recalls both the chronicles of Einhard and the later fictional tradition epitomized by Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa. Yet it remains distinct in its focus on the Carolingian moment, a period too often reduced to political triumphs but in reality suffused with intellectual and spiritual tensions. By embedding fictional intrigue within the very real theological controversies of Frankfurt (794), the intellectual program of Alcuin, and the missionary zeal of the Carolingian clergy, the work transcends the conventions of the historical thriller.

Ultimately, the abbey becomes a crucible in which the perennial dialectic between knowledge and secrecy, orthodoxy and heresy, justice and ambition, is enacted. Bernardo’s discovery of the relic’s secret is not only a narrative resolution but also a symbolic affirmation: in a world torn between empire and eternity, innocence allied to wisdom may yet prevail over the brutal seductions of absolute power.

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Between Empire and Eternity: Theological and Political Intrigues in a Carolingian Abbey

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Historical fiction at its highest level does not merely reconstruct the past; it interrogates it. The novel under consideration, set in the year 797, situates itself at the very cusp of Charlemagne’s imperial coronation by Pope Leo III, a moment that would redefine the political and religious cartography of medieval Europe. The Frankish monarch, whose campaigns had secured the western borders of Christendom, is here portrayed not only as the guarantor of the Church’s temporal power but as the symbolic center of an emergent Christian universality. Yet the novel’s stage is not Aachen, nor Rome, but a secluded German abbey, a locus where the tensions between empire, theology, and clandestine ambition converge.

At the heart of the drama lies a fabulous object—vestige of an older wisdom, perhaps a relic, perhaps an artifact—which tradition ascribes a capacity to bestow limitless power. Its custody, entrusted to the enigmatic Ramiro, a Spanish exile reputed to possess arcane knowledge, recalls the early medieval intertwining of Christian piety with lingering echoes of esoteric traditions. Ramiro’s death unleashes a clandestine war within the abbey: imperial agents, foreign spies, and ecclesiastical factions engage in a struggle that mirrors, in miniature, the broader geopolitical fractures of the age.

The protagonist, Bernardo, a young novice of noble lineage, provides the narrative’s lens. Through his eyes, the reader discovers a monastic universe at once sacred and perilous. The abbey is not merely a house of prayer; it is a microcosm of Carolingian society, where intellectual labor in the scriptorium coexists with brutal contests for dominance. The presence of the missi dominici, imperial envoys charged with overseeing the King’s law, evokes the Carolingian program of administrative centralization, while theological disputes among the monks reproduce the wider debates that would shape Christian orthodoxy: the filioque controversy, the Trinitarian mystery, and the perennial tension between visible institutions and invisible truths.

Stylistically, the novel achieves a rare synthesis. Its descriptive passages, reminiscent of medieval chronicles yet enriched with modern psychological insight, conjure landscapes in which nature reflects human turmoil: November forests glazed with frost, cloisters reverberating with whispered conspiracies, snow-covered courtyards where innocence is hunted by intrigue. The prose oscillates between lyric evocation—where children perceive the world with a flayed sensitivity—and scholastic disputation, where questions of the soul’s immortality, divine justice, and the possibility of magic become urgent rather than abstract.

One of the work’s most striking dimensions is its meditation on power. The fatal destiny of all those who attempt to seize the hidden relic without grasping its key suggests that true authority cannot be reduced to mere possession. Here the novel echoes the Augustinian vision of earthly power as precarious unless rooted in justice (De civitate Dei, XIX). Likewise, the monastic debates on the Trinity and the soul highlight the precarious balance between orthodoxy and heresy in a world where theological error could prove as dangerous as political treason.

What emerges, ultimately, is a narrative that transcends the boundaries of the historical thriller. The abbey becomes a stage upon which the eternal dialectic between faith and ambition, knowledge and secrecy, justice and domination, is played out. Bernardo, in deciphering the enigma that consumes others, represents not only youthful innocence but the possibility of wisdom purified of greed. The novel thus situates itself within a venerable lineage—from Augustine’s reflections to Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa—in which the cloistered world of monks serves as the crucible for universal questions.

In this sense, the book is more than a tale of espionage in a medieval monastery. It is a meditation on the nature of power, the fragility of truth in a world of factions, and the enduring human temptation to grasp the infinite through finite means. To read it is to be reminded that the Carolingian world, for all its distance from us, was haunted by dilemmas that remain strikingly contemporary.

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Echoes of Power and Faith: A Journey into the Monastic Intrigues of the Carolingian World

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There are novels that transport the reader beyond the boundaries of imagination by rooting their narrative firmly within the soil of history. This work, set in the twilight years of the eighth century, belongs unmistakably to that tradition. We are in the year 797, at the very threshold of Charlemagne’s apogee, when the monarch’s sword not only guaranteed the stability of the Church’s temporal power but also its expanding dominion over the souls of Europe. Soon, Pope Leo III would crown him Emperor of the West. Yet, far from the imperial capitals, in a secluded German abbey, an extraordinary secret lies concealed—an object said to grant limitless power, but one that has proved fatal to all those who attempt to wield it without understanding its hidden key.

The story is filtered through the eyes of Bernardo, a young novice whose innocence collides with the ruthless reality of espionage, betrayal, and murder. Within the abbey’s walls, spies in the service of great powers wage a silent war, driven by insatiable ambition. Torture and assassination become their instruments, yet each who dares to grasp the coveted relic meets an inexorable death. Only Bernardo, through a combination of intuition, courage, and the wisdom of unlikely allies, will come to decipher the enigma that eluded so many.

The prose reveals itself as both lyrical and precise. With painterly detail, the author conjures landscapes glazed in the frosts of late November, monasteries humming with the disciplined fervor of monastic labor, and interiors suffused with both sanctity and menace. The narrative voice balances the intimacy of childhood memories with the gravity of theological disputation, philosophical reflections, and political intrigue. In these pages, we are reminded that medieval children perceive the world with an acuity of feeling adults often forget, and that monasteries—though ostensibly devoted to prayer—were crucibles of power struggles, intellectual ferment, and sometimes unspeakable violence.

The dialogues resonate with authenticity, capturing not only the theological debates of the age—about the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, and the eternal struggle between faiths—but also the profound human anxieties that lurked behind the cloistered silence. The presence of mysterious deaths, ominous signs in the heavens, and whispered accusations of sorcery and heresy give the narrative the tense rhythm of a medieval thriller. Yet, at its core, the novel reflects on justice, truth, and the perilous seduction of absolute power.

In this tale of faith and fire, history and fiction weave seamlessly into one another. Charlemagne’s empire forms the vast backdrop, but the true drama unfolds in the shadows of an abbey where loyalty is fragile, knowledge is perilous, and innocence becomes both a shield and a weapon. It is a work that will delight lovers of historical fiction, intrigue, and philosophy alike, inviting them to wander through snow-covered cloisters, to witness conspiracies under flickering candlelight, and ultimately to reflect on the timeless question: who is truly worthy of power?

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“THE MYSTERIOUS CANDOR OF TRAINS” (recommended reading)

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   In a sumptuous mansion hanging from a cliff, over the Mediterranean Sea, two corpses appear. They are husband and wife. They are seated at a splendid table, with an impeccable white tablecloth and napkins, complete with candelabras, the most delicate delicacies, wines and champagne. They had dressed to the nines for what had all the appearance of a romantic dinner. However, they had poisoned each other. Why not by common agreement or through the intervention of a third party? Well, because in both cases the most logical thing would have been to use a single poison for both. And there, two different and very difficult to obtain tosigos had been used, both one and the other. But this posed a difficulty: the temporal coincidence in the transition to the act. How, without prior agreement, did it occur to both of them to do the same thing, at the same moment? Inspector Páramo could only think of one clue: the phenomenon known as a red moon had occurred the night before.

   A flashback and a radical change of space intervene. We move to Buenos Aires where a young detective takes his first steps in criminal investigation under the tutelage of Inspector Esteban Mendoza, who, for the first time in his life, finds himself at a dead end because, with all his science and experience, he is not able to catch a serial killer who usually operates around the Retiro Station. This murderer seems to fly under everyone's radar. And there is another thing that particularly puzzles Mendoza. The victims are atrociously mutilated in places where many people should have heard their screams and did not.

   At the same time, another action takes place. A grandmother from the Plaza de Mayo is still investigating the whereabouts of her children, the parents of Donato, the grandson that the police allowed her to keep. Donato's partner becomes obsessed because she thinks she knows the identity of the Retiro murderer. According to her, it is her upstairs neighbor, Mario Aventino.

   Everything will conclude in the luxurious mansion from the beginning, now inhabited by another couple.

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THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

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For more than three decades, a handful of brilliant forgers, all of them at the same time renowned painters, worked so hard and so well that today no one can put their hand in the fire and say, without batting an eyelid, that they possess the original of this or that painting, of any famous painter, of this or no matter what other era. The scientific experts, skilled in the most modern techniques of dating and attribution, the most prestigious gallery owners, art historians, auctioneers, and other intervenors in the field, have all let slip fakes that have consequently been catalogued as authentic and sold as such. The existence of two and even three or more apocrypha of many of them was later discovered. A strict censorship has been imposed on the media; a real veto has fallen from the highest levels that has turned the subject into a sacred taboo. For if it were to spread, panic would spread, as distrust spreads regarding what the system has turned into the supreme currency of exchange, which not only never devalues itself, but has, in recent years, increased in value according to a geometrical progression. The safe-haven value that has more than replaced gold. The elites who hold absolute power would lose colossal amounts of money and their influence would be diminished, to the detriment of their unspeakable projects. With a perfect mastery of the technique of thriller and suspense, Alba Longa tells us the story in which he himself was involved and, during which, he almost cost him his skin. THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR is set in cosmopolitan Nice that is about to experience the most dramatic events in its history. To tell the truth, you don’t come out well reading this novel. The reader is left with the impression that the most sacred words in the world today: freedom, democracy, human rights, social progress and so many others, are nothing but manufactured mirages, a smokescreen called NWO (New World Order) that prevents us from seeing ourselves for what we are: the new slaves of the Empire, at the unconditional service of other Nero and Caligula  who are not mad, and for that very reason is more wicked than the former.  

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Masks always speak with an English accent.

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Clara Bardés, granddaughter of a famous deceased painter, has been hired to restore a series of paintings, some dating from the Middle Ages, which are preserved in the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. During a solitary visit to the upper part of the building, when the tourists have already left, she notices the deformed silhouette of Ergaster, a perverse torturer whom she believed to be dead and of whom she could have been another victim, along with Professor Alba Longa, had it not been for the fact that, at the last moment, Commissioner Tynianov intervened. The cathedral closed behind her, and the criminal, who had apparently not seen her, remained inside. Once in her apartment, terrified, she called Alba Longa and he contacted Tynianov. Between the three of them, pulling the thread of the presence in the cathedral of this murderer, a specialist in the so-called “death of a thousand cuts,” they discover a terrible conspiracy, the disastrous consequences of which are expected for the next few days.

Second year of Macron’s reign. As we predicted in the previous book, France is under the sign of chaos and desolation. For the twentieth consecutive Saturday, the streets of Paris and the main cities of the country are the scene of a confrontation, violent and intransigent, between a people and a police that has unconditionally placed she herself at the orders of an elite; which, by an anti-democratic and corrupting procedure of an already defective political system, has illegitimately seized all the organs of power and is not willing to yield an inch to the massive protests of an entire social body, whose standard of living has been dangerously degraded by the various previous governments, in which it already dominated,   although not with the arrogance, with the morgue, with the absolute and unfailing contempt that it is doing now, completely devoid of any humanitarian feeling towards those who have no choice but to live on salaried work.

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“Unraveling the Mystery: The Notre-Dame de Paris Fire and Its Myriad Theories”

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The catastrophic fire that engulfed Notre-Dame de Paris on April 15, 2019, sent shockwaves around the world. As the flames devoured the iconic cathedral's spire and parts of its roof, questions about the origin of the fire and the events leading up to it multiplied. The incident spurred a plethora of theories, each attempting to decipher the enigma surrounding the destruction of this historic masterpiece.

One prevailing theory points to an accidental fire caused by an electrical malfunction. Given the age of Notre-Dame, electrical systems were being updated as part of the ongoing renovations. Critics argue that a short circuit or faulty wiring might have sparked the flames. Proponents of this theory emphasize that accidents during construction and restoration projects are not uncommon.

As Notre-Dame was undergoing extensive restoration work at the time of the fire, another theory suggests that human error during the renovation process led to the catastrophe. Welding equipment, hot tools, or even a discarded cigarette could have ignited the blaze. Critics highlight the inherent risks associated with construction activities and argue that a momentary lapse in caution might have had severe consequences.

Conspiracy theories abound, with some suggesting that the fire was a result of deliberate human action. Arson, though vehemently denied by officials, is a persistent theory. Motivations range from anti-religious sentiments to politically driven agendas. Skeptics question the timing of the fire, occurring during Holy Week, and speculate about possible intentional acts aimed at causing irreparable damage.

Critics argue that negligence in enforcing fire safety measures played a role in the extent of the damage. Questions were raised about the adequacy of fire prevention systems and the response time of emergency services. Some theories suggest that a more robust and swift reaction could have contained the fire before it spiraled out of control.

Beyond the realms of rationality, some theories delve into the supernatural. Symbolic interpretations posit that the fire was a deliberate act aimed at erasing historical and religious significance. Conspiracy theories entertain the idea of secret societies orchestrating the event for obscure motives.

The fire at Notre-Dame de Paris remains shrouded in mystery, and despite the meticulous investigations conducted, a definitive answer to its origin is yet to emerge. Theories continue to circulate, reflecting the complexity of the incident and the deep emotional and cultural impact it had on people worldwide. As restoration efforts persist, the quest for understanding the truth behind the Notre-Dame fire stands as a testament to humanity's desire to unravel the mysteries of its past.

Here is a fictional treatment of the event: 



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“The Dual Nature of Humanity: Unveiling the Enigma of ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'”

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Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” published in 1886, is a timeless masterpiece that delves into the duality of human nature. This dark and suspenseful tale has captivated readers for over a century, sparking philosophical discussions about good and evil, and the inherent struggle between our dual selves.

At the heart of the story is the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, a well-regarded physician and scientist in Victorian London. Yet beneath the facade of respectability lies a profound and dangerous secret: Dr. Jekyll has discovered a potion that transforms him into the sinister and unhinged Mr. Edward Hyde. This metamorphosis sets the stage for a thrilling exploration of the human psyche.

Stevenson’s narrative unfolds through the eyes of Mr. Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer and close friend of Dr. Jekyll. As Utterson becomes entangled in the mystery surrounding Mr. Hyde and his malevolent actions, he embarks on a quest to unravel the enigmatic connection between these two seemingly different individuals. The novella keeps readers in suspense, with each revelation uncovering another layer of intrigue.

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” delves deep into the psychological turmoil that Dr. Jekyll experiences. He creates Mr. Hyde as a means of liberating his darker impulses and desires without the constraints of societal norms. This internal struggle mirrors the broader human condition, where people often grapple with their darker instincts, yearning for release from the constraints of morality.

The novella raises fundamental questions about the nature of good and evil. Is it possible to separate these two opposing forces within an individual? Can one indulge in their darker desires without becoming wholly consumed by them? Stevenson explores the moral implications of Dr. Jekyll’s actions, questioning whether he should be held responsible for the crimes committed by Mr. Hyde.

The setting of Victorian London, with its stark contrast between the respectable facade of the upper class and the seedy underbelly of the city, serves as a powerful backdrop for the narrative. The city’s dual nature mirrors the internal conflict of the story’s characters, emphasizing the idea that good and evil coexist in every society and individual.

One of the novella’s enduring strengths is its brevity and conciseness. Stevenson masterfully packs a profound exploration of human nature into a compact narrative, making it accessible to a wide range of readers. Its impact on literature and culture cannot be overstated, as the concept of a Jekyll and Hyde personality has become a widely recognized symbol of the dual nature within us all.

In conclusion, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is a literary classic that continues to captivate readers and scholars alike. Through its exploration of duality, morality, and the darker aspects of human nature, Stevenson’s novella challenges us to examine our own inner struggles and the boundaries between good and evil. It serves as a reminder that within each of us, there exists a complex interplay of light and darkness, and that the true enigma lies in our capacity to choose which path we follow.

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THE FRENCH BLACK NOVEL

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In summary: the French crime novel evolves from the reception of the American hard-boiled novel towards its own tradition, marked by polar and social criticism.

History and features of the French polar

The crime novel is a literary genre that has gained much importance in French literature in recent years. With its focus on investigation and mystery, the crime novel has captured the attention of readers and has proven to be an effective means of exploring deep and relevant themes in French society.

In addition to being entertaining, crime novels offer a cryptic vision of French society and politics, and show the complexity and ambiguity of current social and political problems, of which there are many. Black literature is, indeed, an exceptional means of examining contemporary concerns, including corruption, social justice, racism, and cultural identity.

Another important aspect of the French crime novel is its ability to combine elements of mystery and suspense with a robust narrative and complex characters. French authors are known for their ability to create intricate plots and dense, captivating characters, allowing them to explore deep themes in ways that are accessible and engaging for readers.

The noir genre has also been an important means of influencing popular culture and political thought in France. Many crime novels have been adapted into films and television series, and have contributed to the formation of public opinions and debates on important issues.

The crime novel has a long and rich history in this country that dates back to the 1920s. During this period, writers of this nationality began to experiment with the genre, creating complex plots and enigmatic characters that captured the imagination of readers.

One of the first exponents of the French crime novel was Georges Simenon, whose works, starring the famous detective Jules Maigret, established the foundations for the genre in France. Simenon was noted for his ability to create intriguing plots and dark characters, and his influence on French noir literature is undeniable.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, French crime fiction experienced a renaissance, with writers such as Frédéric Dard and Michel Zévaco producing influential works in the genre. In particular, the work of Dard, known as the "master of the French crime novel", introduced elements of humor and satire to the genre and established a new standard in French crime literature.

Since then, crime fiction has continued to evolve and grow, with authors such as Jean-Claude Izzo, Michel Bussi and Fred Vargas producing outstanding works in the genre. Currently, the French crime novel is a highly respected and appreciated genre, with a large number of authors and works that have been translated and disseminated throughout the world.

Furthermore, the influence of the crime novel has spread in this country beyond literary borders, with many works being adapted to films, television series and theater. These adaptations have helped increase the popularity of crime fiction and have contributed to its evolution and growth.

In short, the history of the French crime novel is a story of evolution and growth, with a long list of influential authors and works that have contributed to its development and rise in popularity. From its origins to the present day, the French crime novel has been an important medium for the exploration of relevant themes in society and has captured the imagination of readers around the world. Its long and rich history has been shaped by many of the greatest writers of literature in this language, who have left a lasting legacy and established the foundations for the genre in France. Below are some of the most important and influential authors.

Georges Simenon is, as has already been noted, one of the first and most important exponents. Known for his detective character Jules Maigret, Simenon occupies a place of honor among the greatest crime novel writers of all time. His unique style and his ability to create convoluted plots and complex characters have made him a key figure in the history of crime fiction in France, setting the tone for its evolution.

Frédéric Dard is another classic author of the genre at hand. Known as the "master of the French crime novel", Dard stood out for his ability to introduce elements of humor and satire into the genre, combined with a particular skill for etchings, thereby managing to establish a new standard in French crime literature, an unmistakable patent. His works, starring the detective San Antonio, have been translated and appreciated throughout the world.

Michel Zévaco is a classic French crime novel writer who had a great influence on the genre during the 1950s and 1960s. Known equally for his elaborate plots and complex characters, with which he is part of the most marked national trend, Zévaco has earned the respect and admiration of readers and critics. His work has been equally translated and appreciated throughout the world.

These are the classic crime novel authors who have left a lasting legacy and established the foundations for the genre in France. With their mysterious plots, enigmatic, complex characters, and unique styles, impregnated with a strong invoice of technique and experimentation, these authors have subjugated the imagination of readers and have constituted an important means for the exploration of relevant topics in society.

From polar to contemporary investigation, these forms transform the relationship between crime and society. The architecture of crime offers a framework for analyzing them.

Go deeper with The Architecture of Crime

The crime novel has undergone a significant evolution in the current French literary scene. Although it still maintains some of the classic elements of the genre, contemporary writers have introduced new perspectives and approaches that have transformed the genre and taken it to new levels of complexity and social relevance.

One of the biggest changes in French crime fiction is the inclusion of diverse perspectives and voices. Nowadays, it is more common to see writers who address social and political issues, including aspects such as social justice, equality and immigration; which, treated with the instrument of the crime novel, reveal themselves to be much more percussive and compelling than through other media, often more domesticated and abstract.

Furthermore, technological evolution has had a significant impact on this genre as well as many others. Contemporary writers are happy to experiment with new ways of telling stories and use information technologies to create unique and enriching reading experiences. From the incorporation of game elements and interactivity to the use of transmedia narratives, technology is allowing writers to explore new ways to narrate in innovative ways.

The narrative technique is also a fundamental aspect of the French crime novel and has been an integral part of the genre since its origins. French authors have used a wide variety of narrative techniques in order to magnify the effect of those particularly elaborate plots, complex characters and tense atmospheres, which constitute their trademark.

One of the most common narrative techniques is the use of multiple narrators. This approach allows authors to explore different perspectives and points of view, which can add depth and complexity to the plot and characters. Additionally, the use of multiple narrators can also create tension and surprise, as readers may form different opinions about the characters and plot.

Another important narrative technique is the use of flashbacks and flash-forwards. Gallic authors often use this technique to provide information about characters' pasts and how they influence their present. Flashbacks can also create tension and suspense by showing critical events that can have a significant impact on the plot.

The use of an omniscient narrator is also a common narrative technique. This approach allows authors to tell the story from a global perspective and provide a complete overview of the characters and plot. However, using an omniscient narrator can also create distance between characters and readers, which can affect emotion and immersion in the plot fabric.

Narrative technique is, therefore, a crucial aspect of the French crime novel and has been a key factor in the evolution and success of this literary genre. Today, technique continues to be an important aspect of French crime fiction and it is hoped that authors will continue to explore and use different narrative approaches in the future, as they are generally given to formal innovation.

Black authors have also created in this literary tradition a wide range of memorable and complex characters that are characteristic of the genre. One of the most common in crime novels of any nationality is, of course, the private detective or the police inspector. Such individuals often manifest a strong personality and usually have a dark past or a troubled personal life which makes them even more interesting.

The murderer or criminal also plays a key role in French crime fiction. These characters are often portrayed as intelligent and cunning, which often makes them the main obstacle for the detective or police inspector. They are also frequently carriers of complex motivations and traumatic pasts that explain their behavior.

Another important character in this type of crime novel is that of the victim or witness. These characters often possess crucial information about the crime and can be revealed as the key to solving the mystery. However, they can also be in danger and be a target for the murderer or criminal.

In addition to the main characters, authors also like to introduce a wide range of supporting characters, such as friends, family, co-workers, and more. These can sometimes be just as important to the plot and the narrative often delves into his complex personal life, which eventually hides dark secrets.

In conclusion, crime fiction has been a popular and enduring genre in France and around the world for many years. Although it has evolved over time, its success and relevance have remained constant. So what can we expect from the future of French crime fiction?

Firstly, it is likely that the crime novel will continue to evolve in this country and adapt to new times and changes in society. The authors are likely to continue exploring new plots and relevant themes, such as technology, cybersecurity, and globalization.

Furthermore, it is possible that French crime fiction will continue to explore new formats and platforms. With the rise in popularity of electronic literature and podcasts, French authors may use these mediums to reach a broader audience and diversify their reach.

Another important aspect to take into account is the impact of diversity and inclusion in literature in general and in French crime fiction in particular. Given the multiplicity of ethnic origins that constitute the social fabric of this country, it is more than likely that its authors continue to address issues such as racial, gender and cultural diversity, and that they create characters representative of all this great variety of groups in their plots.

In short, also in this country, and in this language, because France is much more than metropolitan France and the French-speaking world includes multiple nationalities as a consequence of its colonial past, the crime novel is in great health and its future is promising and full of opportunities. As society and technology continue to evolve, French crime fiction is likely to continue to evolve and maintain its relevance and popularity. With the exploration of new themes and formats, as well as the inclusion of more diversity and representation, the future of French crime fiction looks bright.

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THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE ALBA LONGA SERIES.

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   The French Antilles are inflamed. The images that reach us are shocking: cars and buildings burning, pickets filtering traffic in the roundabouts and shooting with real bullets at the police, armored vehicles patrolling the streets, helicopter whirring in the night sky and the government sending special forces and anti-terrorist units to suppress, according to the way they are trained, the rebellion.

   In the metropolis, journalists, commentators, debaters and other agents of authority rush, cutting each other off, to declare that the situation in these overseas departments is not in danger of being transmitted to metropolitan France. No? Have we not seen similar images on this shore of the Atlantic for three consecutive years? Have not the Champs Elysées caught fire, Saturday after Saturday? Haven't cars and motorcycles set fire to the main avenues of all major French cities? Have such events not left a sad consequence of one-eyed and crippled people, as a consequence of the terrible orders that the two Macron governments have given to the police in charge of repression?

   Have the reasons that pushed people to take to the streets disappeared? Not at all. The inflation of recent months, the increase in the prices of gas, electricity, firewood, bread, not to mention that what has increased is everything except salaries, constitute elements that allow us to assume that social anger not only will not decrease, but will progressively increase, given that the government has done absolutely nothing to alleviate the precarious situation of the majority. With the exception of reversing the disastrous pension reform, although they do not hide at all that it is only a postponement, that they do not renounce it in any way and that, as soon as Macron is re-elected, they will implement it without the slightest hesitation, because in reality it was already approved and only the arrival of the pandemic stopped it. in extremis the ax already raised by the executioner's hand.

   The health crisis attenuated the manifestation of social unrest, but did not make it disappear. Despite the restrictions and obstacles to the free movement of people, at no time did the tumults and demonstrations of grievance against that haughty and hypocritical, manipulative and contemptuous power cease, a wolf in sheep's clothing to better surprise and devour the common people, who, by the way, was he, along with his predecessors of the same suit, who cut the allocations to the public hospital until it was bloodless.  

   This health crisis is, certainly, rightly or wrongly, one more excuse to launch the machine of discontent against the other machine of tyranny, which is supported by propaganda and the sophisticated weapons of the riot police. But not only that, how can we trust those who have lost all vestiges of shame and sense of honesty, justice and loyalty? People imagine things, and at this point, how can you blame them for doing so?

   In the analysis we made of the current French political context in the Alba Longa series, particularly in its last two installments, The House Next Door y The masks always speak with an English accent, we believe we have not made a mistake in the diagnosis, which, by the way, continues to be confirmed. Macron was chosen by the financial elite (entire France was wallpapered with that individual's advertising and this was neither done for free, nor did it constitute a free free data), to carry out, against all odds, the ad hominem policy that the traditional parties, representatives of the rights of said oligarchic elite, had proven incapable of carrying out. The risk was the social explosion in a gasoline tank. And their pulse did not tremble to do so. However, the consequences could be unpredictable. What is happening in the Antilles is certainly neither the beginning nor probably the end.

   The only solution, in my opinion, is for him to turn his face, like the wise man, and look at what his predecessor did at the end of his mandate.

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GABINETE RESERVADO

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DILEMMA

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   Mauricio de Sully went, alone, on Monday night, to check if Fabrice had returned. Still, breaking his word to John Temple Graves, he did not call the police. In recent times, enough scandals have involved the Church to make a mistake due to a not entirely justified haste and in relation to a simple sacristan. If something has happened to this bastard, it's well deserved, because deep down he's nothing more than a cunt. With so much time he's had since he's been here to make the astracanada of yore and it occurs to him to carry it out precisely at this crucial and, I would even dare to say, dramatic moment. What a joke the pelafustan has prepared for us. Days before what is going to happen in this same cathedral, which will turn the world upside down, and here he sends us to the police, no less, the police, to poke their noses into every corner of the building looking for this thief that God confuses. No, there are people who definitely have the gift of opportunity.

   Irritated, the rector archpriest retired to his chambers and, despite everything, slept on both ears.

   The next day he woke up refreshed and without thinking in the slightest about the matter. After washing the complicated face that was his property, he went to the dining room in search of breakfast and the morning newspapers. As usual, everything was already ready. He poured a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice to the brim and drank it in one gulp. He filled it out again, but this time, before finishing it, as he usually did, with speed and determination, he reached out his hand and glanced at the headlines of the first newspaper. He went white. His eyeballs seemed to want to pop out of their sockets and fall, like pingpong balls, onto the table. All the newspapers carried the same or similar headlines. "Wave of disappearances in Paris within the city walls. No less than half a dozen have been recorded in twenty-four hours and the police suspect there will be more." Then he read the details: "According to official media, the disappearances have all occurred within the indicated radius of action, although in the most heterogeneous scenarios, the street, the subway, a cinema and even the interior of a private home. Never in the history of crime has such activity been recorded. The entire Paris police are in a state of maximum alert and the greatest caution is strongly recommended, avoiding, for example, moving alone, through remote and solitary places. The victims do not have a precise profile. Anyone can be considered in danger.”

   Monsignor de Sully was stunned. That didn't stop him from gulping down, as always, the glass of juice and putting the entire breakfast between his chest and back, without wasting a single crumb.

   He then went to look for the key to the sacristanesque apartment and carry out a final check.

   As he feared, it was empty and the bed was as made as the day before. He hasn't come back, the big bastard. If you make me call the police and then nothing happens to you, I'm going to hit you with one of those cigars… A cigar that not even Fidel Castro could have dreamed of being made in the very country of cigars. A cigar that the sacristan dancer who has assigned us will not be able to hold it with both hands. He will spend a year ringing the cathedral bells, manually, the old-fashioned way.

   He returned to the dining room and placed his cell phone in front of him, on the white tablecloth. Black on white. That's how split he was. If I call, I endanger something very important, an unprecedented operation and I even run the risk of attracting the wrath of the Inveterate Enemy, who could accuse me of treason. On the other hand, the plan of the True Church could collapse. And all for a sacristan. No, if the thing has eggs. Wow he has them.

   On the other side of the scale is that, if I don't call, given the circumstances, I could even find myself in the dock for not providing aid to a person in danger. Furthermore, if the plan, despite everything, continues its course and comes to fruition, such an attitude could raise the suspicions of the police, who would handle the case from the field and the official perspective.

   Bad if I walk and bad if I don't walk. To do? Because, whatever the circumstances, you always have to act, especially when someone has some type of authority. Authority is responsibility. And where will the ox go that does not plow?

   He extended his left hand toward his cell phone. The screen lit up and he entered the access code for the device. Yes, you will have to call the police, but not just anyone. He searched his repertoire for the right person. He carefully dropped the broad tip of his index finger that could call, if that were possible, three adjacent contacts at once. The correct name appeared on the screen and, on the third signal, a deep bass voice emerged.

-Commissioner Esteban de Velasco, at your service, Monsignor.

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FRAGMENT FROM “MASKS ALWAYS SPEAK WITH AN ENGLISH ACCENT.”

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VIII

   Bemoz and his lieutenants, as well as his operational team and other members of his entourage, had been assigned a mansion on the outskirts of Paris as their domicile for the duration of operations in that capital.

   Sitting alone, on the porch of his temporary residence, in front of a gargantuan table covered with a blindingly white tablecloth, he devoured the lunch that his personal cook, who accompanied him on all his trips to the five continents, had prepared for him that Sunday. The waiters came periodically to remove the empty plates, as well as the mountains of spines and bones, absolutely plain, that the colossus was leaving aside.

   In the perfect silence of the mansion, only the singing orchestra of the winged inhabitants of the thick jungle made up of the garden that surrounded the main building was tolerated.

   From time to time, a servant in livery would approach and refill the glass that was never to be shown empty. Between trips, the servant was busy uncorking the different bottles of white or red wine, always the best and most expensive wines, depending on the established program. To finish, a bottle of champagne, whose value exceeded the monthly salary of a worker, was chilling in the refrigerator, waiting to be opened at the right moment for the sophisticated dessert.

   While Bemoz's powerful jaws chewed the different delicacies with the power and sufficiency of a hydraulic machine, his brain ruminated on the latest events.

   The idea of ​​taking advantage of the notorious dislike of the rector archpriest, Maurice de Sully, for Viollet-le-Duc had turned out to be brilliant. The result produced was something unusual, unthinkable, apparently contradictory, and highly profitable. The inveterate and bitter enemies collaborating in a common cause. Of course, in a punctual and temporary manner, absolutely exceptional.

   The archpriest had shown himself to be an intransigent negotiator, he had bargained short, both with respect to the formal commitment of the State to rebuild according to a precise plan, and in relation to the subsequent reaction of the Church, collaborative, yes, but only to a certain point and limited in time. The essential thing, however, had been achieved, namely, that he did not shout to the heavens and did not call, out of hand, for a crusade. Anyway, the main head of the beast, although not the only one, we control. If they decided to break part of the conditions, they wouldn't get very far.

   Now everything is ready. A special fuel was needed to make those ancient, almost fossilized beams burn. Agni already has one made from liquid oxygen in his tabuco and knows how to use it. In a few minutes, the roof will burn like a torch, illuminating the Paris sky at dusk. The statues of Viollet-le-Duc have been removed with the double excuse of being restored and cleaned, for the common people, and to prevent them from causing, with their weight, greater harm by collapsing, for the archpriest. It was necessary to promise that they will never be replaced.  

   The symbols, not only of Paris, but of all of France, are the Eiffel Tour y Notre-Dame. When the French see the latter engulfed in flames, there will be a national commotion equivalent to a declaration of war. The entire country will be left breathless and all other worries and disagreements will take a backseat. The social body will remain united like a pineapple waiting for the instructions of the head of state. Goodbye to the weekly carnival of the yellow vests. The revolt will be uprooted, since no one goes out to scream in the streets when they are short of breath. The rest will depend on the skill of the politicians, who will certainly receive instructions on how to behave in due course.

   Once the revolution is suffocated in France, it will immediately be extinguished in the rest of the world. Once and for all, his Masters must recognize how much he is worth, how much he deserves the bread they feed him and the few, although expensive, whims they grant him.  

   It was the first time that Bemoz was going to use his new toy and, given the special characteristics of his baptism of fire, he had given him the name Agni. And Agni will stay with him forever, he decided. There is something ineffable in the Indian that inspires, even in him, the beast arising from the earth, a sacred terror. From the beginning he had sensed that it would be of great use to him. Under his rule, there will be no shortage of missions. It would have been an intolerable waste for such an individual to be lost.

   Once his mission is completed, he will escape through the sewers like the filthy and gigantic rat that he is, without anyone seeing him leave the cathedral. Afterwards, a team will recover it and bring it here, where I will put it in its case until the new operation. Now, it will be necessary to give him, from time to time, the food he needs, without which his loyalty will not be available. For this there are places much more remote than this and enemies worthy of your care and attention.

   After scraping the bone from the last leg of lamb, he sucked it noisily and left it on the tablecloth, as if it were just another knife, a wild butcher's knife. He grabbed a napkin and unfolded it, wiping it first over his mouth and chin, reaching up to part of his cheeks, all of which had accumulated an enormous amount of fat and glistened as if the skin were illuminated from the inside, then his hands, equally sticky. After that, he grabbed the cup, which resembled a mass chalice, and emptied it in one gulp.

   Immediately the waiter came with the trays of cakes and the pourer with the champagne. Bemoz swallowed them whole and drank more than a greeter. After that waiter came another and then another and finally one more, until a formidable, thunderous belch, worthy of the giant Gargantua, put a sudden end to all that. ballet of liveries and trays and silver and gold cutlery, the hustle and bustle ceasing until nightfall.    Everyone knew that the ogre would take a nap for hours and then they could unbutton the last buttons on their shirts and breathe deeply. As long as the entire body of the building shook with their snoring, they could enjoy a period of serenity. Then everything had to start again for dinner.

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