The cruel hours of Marto Pariente

About the book

One of the most awarded writers of contemporary crime fiction is back.

A country noir that surprises us with its agile and mischievous prose and its cast of characters in the purest Fargo style.

There is no way out, he has reached a crossroads: either he jumps from the top of the cliff into the waters of the Bornova or he dies at the hands of whoever is chasing him. Tomás Moreda, the Monster of the Black Tile, is quick to resolve the dilemma. May God decide whether he will survive the fall or succumb for his only sin: not remembering what happened that day thirty years ago, when he lost his children in the forest and was accused of having killed them. Where are his children?

No one doubts that he buried them and that he will go to the grave without confessing.

A week later, his whereabouts are still unknown. Is he still alive? To find the answer to this question, Tomás Moreda’s mother, the only one convinced of his innocence, turns to Constanza Desaparecidos, an agency that continues searching when the police run out of resources. Frank Durán, an ex-policeman expelled from the force “for being sentimental,” and Eliana Santoro, who deal, like the Monster of the Black Tile, with their own ghosts – the death of the person they love and the abuses of the one who should love and protect us – will descend into the underworld of the city of Guadalajara and immerse themselves in the history, geography and ancestral beliefs of the people of the Sierra Norte in a race against time against the demon that stalks them and that lives in all of us, Samael, the angel of death, the Poison of God.

Set deep in the Guadalajara countryside, in a place in the middle of nowhere on the way to the swamps and with a cast of characters in the purest Fargo style, Marto Pariente narrates, at the pace of a film script, a chronicle about loneliness, corruption, childhood traumas and loyalty.

LITERARY KEYS

The Cruel Hours fuses the detective genre without abandoning the codes and characters of the noir genre. In addition to this idea (which opens up the range of future readers), the novel leaves the hackneyed cities, with their urban times and customs, to bring the reader closer to the so-called country noir with its closed forests, black slate villages and dusty crossroads.

The author’s narrative style, stripped of descriptive displays, with a prose as agile as it is mischievous, goes to the heart of the action through short but intense chapters, some hilarious scenes, others full of violent tenderness, which close a plot that could give the impression of having been woven with simplicity but which undoubtedly takes a lot of work behind it.

Marto Pariente is a civil servant with extensive experience in various fields of research, a background that is clearly reflected in these pages. He has published several novels with small publishing houses with which he has won several national awards.

The author once again shows a very special gift for narrating dark plots with characters that undoubtedly remind us of Tarantino or the Cohen brothers. His clearest reference is Don Winslow or Fargo. He has also managed to squeeze the knowledge of the land to create a perfectly woven story, without gaps.

It is one of those novels that brings freshness to the genre and is worth every minute spent reading and enjoying.

«Marto Pariente reaches narrative maturity with this stark story. His voice, as particular as it is disturbing, will be heard over the next few years with the strength it deserves» César Pérez Gellida

MAIN THEMES OF THE NOVEL

Disappearance of minors in Spain From the perspective of the police, society and, above all, that of the families: Marto Pariente’s new story delves into the perspective that is presented to relatives after a disappearance and how they face this new threshold that opens before them, a fateful threshold where the (most) cruel hours await.

REAL FACT: According to the 2022 Annual Report on Missing Persons, published by the Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Spain, a total of 22,285 reports of disappearances were filed during 2021, of which 66% correspond to minors.

REAL FACT: Spain records one case of parental kidnapping every day. The Security Forces are aware of an average of one case of parental kidnapping per day per year, a crime for which 434 police investigations were opened in 2021 following a complaint of the abduction of a minor. Between January and August 2022, 283 cases were recorded, including 14 abroad.

Media trials and parallel trials: One of the topics that is indirectly addressed in the book is the proliferating media trials with presumption of guilt in the press, as well as parallel trials on social networks in the era of disinformation. The author notes how, faced with the prospect of selling and monetizing a story, some media outlets frequently trivialize the real drama at the expense of increasing their audience ratings (»Don’t let reality spoil a good headline»).

This plot also links with how the immediacy that governs the digital ecosystem gives rise to the detriment of informational rigor and the formation of a public opinion based on social media, which are gaining strength in proportion to the increase in user distrust towards the system and traditional channels.

Evil and madness: two scourges of our society The Cruel Hours is built on these two premises and encourages debate: What is more terrifying? Predictable evil or unpredictable madness? The novel constantly oscillates between both worlds, placing the reader in the dilemma of not knowing which is worse, terrified by the real coexistence of these two illnesses of our society, unaware of which of the two can go further.