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Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | HILL, T. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Unrelenting hero of The Summer of Dead Toys, Inspector Hector Salgado returns in another riveting crime thriller
After a company retreat in a remote country house, senior employees of Alemany Cosmetics return with a dark secret. They've each received an anonymous, menacing email of only two words: "Never forget". What's worse, the message is accompanied by a nightmarish photo attachment showing the bodies of dogs--hung to death from a tree--near the very same farm estate they just visited. When they begin killing themselves, one by one, the connection between the shocking photos and the suicides baffles Barcelona law enforcement and corporate think tanks alike, threatening a terrifying end for everyone involved.
Breaking through the insular power structures of these enigmatic executives isn't easy, but Inspector Salgado has his own ways of making those still alive speak up. As the clock is ticking before another suicide, Salgado is doing all he can to bring the terror to an end. Meanwhile, his partner Leire, bored on her maternity leave, remains fixated on Salgado's missing wife, Ruth. She refuses to give up on a case many--including Salgado--fear is hopeless.
Antonio Hill deftly braids these two stories together for a richly layered and darkly chilling thriller about secrets, cover-ups, and devastating lies.
Author Notes
ANTONIO HILL lives in Barcelona. He is a professional translator of English-language fiction into Spanish.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rich, nuanced characterizations distinguish Hill's impressive second thriller featuring Barcelona Insp. Hector Salgado (after 2013's The Summer of Dead Toys). Five months after Gaspar Rodenas, an employee of Alemany Cosmetics, murders his wife and infant daughter and then commits suicide, Sara Mahler, a laboratory technician at Alemany, throws herself in front of a subway train. Gaspar and Sara's colleagues are convinced that one of their own is killing people connected to the cosmetics company and disguising the murders as suicides. Strangely, their terror is not strong enough for them to betray their loyalty to Alemany by disclosing their suspicions to Salgado, who investigates the supposed suicides. Meanwhile, the cop's partner, Leire Castro, begins a secret inquiry into a cold case: the disappearance of Salgado's estranged wife, Ruth Valldaura. Readers will feel both disgust and sympathy as the carefully manicured facades of the inspector and the employees crack under the pressure of the mounting death toll. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In frigid Barcelona, senior membersof a cosmetics company are dying by what appears to be suicide, each havingreceived an email warning accompanied by a disturbing photo of dead dogshanging from a tree.Inspector Hctor Salgado is stillreeling from the events in Hill's terrific debut, The Summer of Dead Toys(2013), in which his strong-willed wife, Ruth, left him for a woman and thendisappeared. An Argentinian who recently relocated to Spain, he's smoking toomuch and sleeping too little. The suicides, including that of a young Austrianwoman who leaped in front of a train, followed a company retreat in a housedeep in the woods. That's where the dogs met their sad fate. While Salgadoinvestigates the deaths, Leire Castro, a pregnant young cop on maternity leave"due to some rogue early contractions," takes it on herself to lookinto Ruth's disappearance. She's convinced that Salgado is too close to thecase to conduct a careful investigation. She revisits his violent confrontationwith a doctor involved in a trafficking scheme and befriends his likable14-year-old son, Guillermo. This book isn't as gripping or thematically rich asits predecessor; Hill follows the multiple-suspect Agatha Christie model a bittoo closely. But his gallery of characters is exceptionally well-drawnSalgadois one of the more appealing world-weary police detectives in crime fictionandBarcelona (where the author lives) provides a fresh backdrop for the action.Another strong effort by the Spanishnovelist, who again sets us up for the next installment of the series with atantalizing ending. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Life is never easy or straightforward in Hill's Barcelona. In this second Hector Salgado novel (following The Summer of Dead Toys, 2013), the Barcelona police detective is still on the sidelines, punishment for his savage beating of human trafficker Dr. Omar. He's also sidelined from the investigation of his wife Ruth's disappearance, and he's wrestling with being a single parent to his teenage son. But when employees of a trendy cosmetics company return from a team-building exercise and begin to commit suicide, Hector is finally brought back into the game. Meanwhile, Leire Castro, Hector's smart and ambitious assistant, on leave awaiting the birth of her child, begins an unauthorized reinvestigation of Ruth's disappearance and finds a link to Omar as well as to the national scandal of Spain's stolen babies. Hector encounters Lola, his lover when he met Ruth, and she aids his investigation while squelching any possibility of resuming their relationship. And through it all, characters ponder, each in his or her own way, a pervasive sense of dread and of impending societal collapse, driven by Spain's disastrous economic problems and income inequality. That dread feels like a Catalan analog to the angst that plagued Henning Mankell's Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander. Stylistically, Hill employs the literary equivalent to what soccer fans call tiki-taka, the intricate and mesmerizing short passing game used by Spain's national team. It's not easy or straightforward, but The Good Suicides is also mesmerizing.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOME STORIES ARE so sad, you want them to have the comfort of a gentle storytelling voice. Tom Bouman extends that kindness in DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY (Norton, $24.95), his beautifully written first novel set in the mountainous region of northeastern Pennsylvania that sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a vast geological treasure, prized and exploited for its natural gas resources. With neighbors feuding over whether to lease drilling rights to companies accused of poisoning the environment, it's no wonder that a crazy old recluse like Aubrey Dunigan would be testy with anyone he finds hanging around his decrepit farm. But these hills are also overrun with meth cookers, dope dealers and Mexican drug cartels. So just because a stranger is found dead on his property doesn't make poor old Aubrey a murderer. Officer Henry Farrell is one of those stoic heroes who see what's in front of their eyes but refuse to let it break their hearts. He plays the fiddle on Tuesday nights with friends who can pick out old bluegrass tunes. He hunts deer and keeps his gun clean, although he can't help feeling bad that the woods are "full of junk," strewn with the detritus of thoughtlessly lived lives. The broader story Bouman tells is more disheartening than the murder story. It's about a hopeless generation of rural Americans who no longer work their own land - if they have any land left and if they have any work at all. Suspicious people living with guard dogs in trailers and abandoned school buses, they're so filled with blind hatred for any kind of authority that they can't see the ground opening up under their feet. WHERE DO THEY go, all those memories that are lost when a mind begins to fail? And who has the courage to set off in search of them? Maud Horsham, the narrator of Emma Healey's spellbinding first novel, ELIZABETH IS MISSING (Harper, $25.99), is aware that she's slipping into dementia. So she depends on the handwritten notes she calls "my paper memory" to remind herself not to buy any more canned peaches or try to cook. She must also remember to look for her best friend, who has disappeared and may be dead, possibly murdered. "I can see they won't listen, won't take me seriously," Maud says of her daughter and the various caretakers who dismiss her concerns. "So I must do something. I must, because Elizabeth is missing." Maud makes her way to Elizabeth's eerily empty house, to the church Elizabeth no longer attends, to the charity shop where they met as volunteer workers and to the local police station, where she's rudely patronized by the same officer who brushed her aside on previous visits. Healey's narrative takes its structure from the shifting patterns of Maud's thoughts, pursuing what appear to be random images back to postwar Britain, when her sister left her husband and simply vanished. No one in authority paid much attention to that either, not when so many wives were running away from hasty war marriages that the newspapers tried to reach them with public pleas. In Maud's deteriorating mind, the two mysteries become so entwined that a fresh clue can dislodge associations from the past yet also make sense in the present. It's a sad and lonely business, watching your identity slowly slip away. But even at the end, Maud insists on making herself heard and understood. WITH CAMPUS VIOLENCE now embedded in our social culture, the classic academic mystery could use an overhaul. Lori Rader-Day gives it the old college try in THE BLACK HOUR (Seventh Street Books, paper, $15.95) by putting familiar genre conventions (the killer on campus, the faculty member as amateur detective, the back-stabbing at the president's reception) in a more realistic context. Amelia Emmet, the sociology professor playing sleuth, not only teaches the "Sociology of Deviance and Crime" but was also the victim of a campus shooting, a crime the teaching assistant with whom she shares the narrative is secretly researching. The traditional whodunit procedures feel so contrived that the background material makes better reading, offering insights into the operation of a student-run suicide hotline and debunking the old myth that someone whose roommate commits suicide automatically gets a single room - without charge - the following semester. ANTONIO HILL'S first novel, "The Summer of Dead Toys," introduced Inspector Héctor Salgado, a temperamental detective with the Catalan police force. Contemptuous of the conformity, hypocrisy and decadence he finds in Barcelona, his adopted city, this moody Argentine lives by the philosophy of his native country's dance. ("As the tangos say, life isn't fair. I pity anyone who thinks otherwise.") Salgado's cynicism runs deeper and darker in THE GOOD SUICIDES (Crown, $26), which presents him with an extraordinary case. After being warned with a cryptic message attached to a photo of three hanged dogs, the senior executives of a successful cosmetics firm begin killing themselves in gruesome ways. The macabre premise is a shocker, but Salgado is the real surprise: a tough cop with the sensitivity to be distressed that no absolution has been granted to these unfortunate men. There are "no good or bad suicides," he glumly acknowledges. "Taking one's own life was the ultimate sin. But if we don't even have that, what is left to us?"
Library Journal Review
Haunted by personal loss (Ruth, his ex-wife, disappeared six months ago), Barcelona's Insp. Hector Salgado remains dedicated to his work. When a suicide of a young woman employed at a boutique cosmetics company comes across his desk, he investigates. Troublingly, another of the firm's employees committed a gruesome murder-suicide a few months earlier. Holding evidence that suggests foul play, Salgado probes deeper into the company's files. The link is a photo of dead dogs sent to the employees, accompanied by a threatening note. Readers are privy to the thoughts of the remaining workers involved, enough to make them all look suspicious, and definitely enough to build a sweaty tension and unease. Salgado's team races against the clock and more information about Ruth's case comes to light, opening up disturbing possibilities. VERDICT Hill's atmospheric sophomore entry, a best seller in Spain, should make you double-check your catalog for the first title, The Summer of Dead Toys. The characters are intriguingly complex and the author skillfully pulls the rug out with a flourish at the end. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.