Solving the mystery is also in the reader’s hands
A death. Deliberate spelling mistakes. Puzzles that will force you to join the investigation.
All thrillers usually begin with a corpse… Or so it seems. This one starts with something that simply doesn’t fit. A word. A letter. An accent mark where it shouldn’t belong. Or perhaps where it should. That is precisely the game of Criminal Errors: you never know if you are looking at a mistake… or a clue.
Marcelo E. Mazzanti offers a thriller that toys with an idea very different from the usual. It isn’t enough to trail an investigation or to draft theories about who might be the culprit. No. The book asks for something more: to look closely, to read between the lines, and to distrust what, under normal circumstances, you would overlook.
And yes. Your suspicions are completely warranted. Now the fun begins. You can stop being a reader to become part of the investigation.
The time has come to choose.
Or you can let yourself be carried along by Ariadne. Follow the story. Read her notes and decipher the riddles alongside her. It seems easy, right? At least as easy as solving a murder.
Or, on the contrary, really play. Ignore her notes. Attempt to solve each of the enigmas that arise on your own. Make mistakes. Go back. Re-read a word because, before you know it, it will no longer mean the same as it did three pages earlier.
Neither option is better or worse. Just different. And in both, you will encounter crossroads where you won’t know which direction to take.
Why? Because the book compels you to look twice at what would normally go unnoticed. A repeated word. A forgotten accent. A spelling mistake. A sentence placed where it apparently shouldn’t belong. Even the chapter titles hide a mystery whose existence the author announces from the first pages, challenging the reader to uncover it before the novel reveals the answer.
It forces you to forget how to read. To learn to read in another way.
And you are the protagonist. You are Ariadne now.
But, who is Ariadne? Not someone special, certainly. Or so she believes. She leads an ordinary life. An ordinary house. A past that doesn’t seem to hide anything extraordinary. Yet there is one detail. One that, if it didn’t exist, would never have driven this story: Ariadne is a cryptologist.
Decoding messages is part of her routine. Finding patterns where others only see jumbled letters is her job. And for the first time, that ability ceases to be a tool and becomes her burden.
However, the greatest challenge she faces isn’t merely solving a mystery that puts everyone around her in danger. She will have to confront herself. That thing she has spent too long avoiding. Some codes are far harder to interpret when they speak about ourselves.
Mazzanti succeeds in making it easy to empathize with her because her choices spring from the same doubts and fears anyone would have. Anyone can imagine cracking a message. The real danger begins when discovering the next answer puts the people she loves most at risk.
The pace becomes part of the game itself. Each puzzle pushes the story forward as the urgency grows and the pages turn almost without you noticing.
Every page is a new challenge. Not only because it hides enigmas, but because the narration itself becomes a puzzle where it’s impossible to know which information is truly relevant and which is part of the noise needed to mislead. And thus, almost without realizing it, you begin to doubt even your own way of reading.
And few things feel as satisfying as discovering that a seemingly insignificant detail had been waiting for many pages to make sense.
The best part is that it never pretends to be anything other than what it promises. It doesn’t aim to construct a complex psychological thriller or an overly technical criminal investigation. Its goal is to entertain, challenge, and keep the reader’s curiosity alive until the last page. And it achieves this with striking naturalness.
When all the pieces fit, you realize the book has been playing with you long before you anticipated. And then comes the hardest part: realizing that many of the answers had always been right before your eyes. Only you hadn’t learned to read them yet.
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Author: Marcelo E. Mazzanti. Title: Criminal Errors. Publisher: Duomo Ediciones. Available from: Todostuslibros.