The trio Carmen Mola has returned to the bookstores, this time with Los Huérfanos, a thriller featuring a high-impact death in the opening pages but without its familiar inspector, Elena Blanco.
The novel opens in Belfast, where it introduces its three protagonists in a hostile environment marked by abuse, violence and vengeance. When the first of them leaves prison, he is already clear that he does not want to stay among the worst corners of the lowest neighborhoods, so he informs his brothers from the orphanage that they will head to Marbella. And it is there that we recover the story of Los Huérfanos, who have managed to build an empire in a city that they share with the Pastor family and with a small, unassuming woman whom everyone knows as Sister Mai, and before whom neither the Huérfanos nor the Pastor family dare to raise their voices. With these ingredients, one could write a novel about mafias, trafficking, luxury, and corpses, but the Molas introduce a connecting thread, Laura, a district attorney with the surname Pastor who is trying to persuade a witness not to back down in the murder trial of one of the Huérfanos, while she deals with her mother who, after years apart, has appeared at her doorstep announcing that she has left her father. As if that were not enough, just a few days later the second death of the novel appears, this time in Laura’s mother’s bed, which she interprets as a message from the Huérfanos, while the reader wonders if it could be the Pastor family pushing the woman to reunite with her husband. And then, when the reader’s mind makes its first deduction with barely a handful of pages read, that is when the game begins.
Los Huérfanos is a novel of those addictive kinds, in which relentless action compels the reader to keep reading to discover what the next threat is. Laura stands out as the main protagonist, with a blunt temperament, a courage that many detectives would envy, and a family I wouldn’t wish on anyone: she tries to absorb the blows as quickly as possible to keep moving. And that is not easy in a Molas novel. Here each character serves a purpose, harbors a secret, and could kill you around the corner. The novel is brisk, violent, and bloody but, above all, it feels real. And not only because we looked for whether there are rats at the opening of the book or because we held our breath in an orphanage—that is almost secondary. The great merit of the novel is that Marbella, that city known for its luxury and excesses, smells rotten beneath the surface. Every gesture, every word, seems to guide toward a world we suspect but did not see until now. Beneath the yachts, buildings, and luxury hotels, vices, money, and power grow in the hands of a different kind of rats.
Los Huérfanos works from the very first pages. The novel opens and closes around each of the characters like a chrysalis, as the plot expands to trap the reader long before they realize that perhaps they won’t be able to receive all the answers. Because, indeed, that is what will happen.
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Author: Carmen Mola. Title: Los Huérfanos.Publisher: Planeta. Available at: Todos tus libros.