A woman and a city
Febrero
todavía*
José Luis Serrano
Editions Roca, 2006 (1 st ed. 2001),
300 pages
Javier Sánchez Zapatero
Translation :
Jean Burrell
Together
with Petra Delicado, Bárbara Arenas and Lonia Guiu,
Amparo Larios makes up the female quartet of the Spanish crime novel.
Created in 2000 by the writer and university lecturer José Serrano,
Larios is a sceptical, disillusioned lawyer from Granada who, on
the brink of facing the crisis of reaching 40, finds herself drawn
by the ups and downs of her profession into various detective intrigues.
In Febrero todavía, the second novel
where she appears as the main character (originally published in
2001 and recently reissued by Editorial Roca), the death of a young
woman is the trigger for the character's routine and somewhat depressing
life to be transformed into an exciting adventure full of surprises.
Taking on the basic features of the ‘amateur detective' – the person
who, without doing police work professionally, ends up filling the
detective role when she finds herself involved in a criminal matter – Larios
gets caught up in the case because she is both the colleague of one
of the victim's best friends and the private lawyer of some of the
main suspects.
A novel of atmosphere and character,
Febrero todavía succeeds
in building up, against the backdrop of the investigation, a splendid
portrait of its heroine and the city through which she moves. Amparos
Larios is an attractive woman who has to take action in a man's world
and who only seems to find in the intrigues she occasionally gets
involved in the stimulus she needs to put up with her constant feeling
of self-doubt, exacerbated in the novel by a recent disappointment
in love and the contrast that places the action in the middle of
the Christmas season, when the presumed and required happy mood only
accentuates the heroine's personal crisis. The context for her adventures,
the city of Granada, becomes yet another character in the book and
provides it with the mysterious interracial enchantment of its streets
and buildings as well as the urban backdrop, slightly folksy in this
case, which every crime novel needs in order to reflect the spirit
of a constantly changing society in which life seems worth less and
less and death may appear round any corner.
Reflection of social and political reality and the intention to transcend
the elements of mystery and intrigue from which every crime story starts
out are emphasized by the author, who has taken the surprising and
innovative decision to point out, for the presumed benefit of readers,
which chapters should necessarily be read in order to understand the
novel's strictly detective plot and which chapters are concerned with
everything beyond the revelation of the truth. However that is to forget
that every narrative is a whole which is far richer than the mere sum
of its parts.
* Still February
