Hi, it's Naomi back with another vlog for you guys today
This time I'm going to be talking about The Invisible Guardian by Dolores Redondo
This book's a crime thriller, the first book in the Baztan trilogy
Apparently it's also been made into a movie that you can see on Netflix but I
haven't had a chance to see it yet. This book follows the main character who is a
police inspector called Amaia Salazar and she is tasked with going back to her
hometown to investigate a series of murders where young teenage girls are
being killed and the scenes and the bodies have been posed in a certain way.
At the same time that she has to do that she also has to deal with the fact that
there are male members of her team in the police who perhaps think they should
have been assigned the case instead of her and so she's got to try and manage
these difficult characters whilst also trying to crack the case as well.
The case brings her back to her hometown and in her hometown she's kind of got to
confront her past a little bit. She's got two sisters who still live there, she's
got Flora who runs the family bakery; she's incredibly driven and motivated
but at the same time she's very combative and quite difficult to
communicate with. She also has another sister, Rose, who is in a different
situation; she's married to a chap that perhaps we
would call him like a layabout, you know he's not very active and she's
trying to extract herself from that unhappy marriage in that situation.
So, Amaia is somewhere in the middle. She has a very supportive husband, James, and she
does work very hard at her job too however there's one theme that does
actually unite all the women which is the fact that they've all want to have
children and for various reasons they don't have children and this is
something that reoccurs during the book, this theme of motherhood and
also fertility issues. And I think the author handles it incredibly well.
It's a very emotive topic but she deals with it very sensitively and I think it's
one of the successes of the novel. The author also inserts these flashbacks to
the 1980s, to Amaia's childhood, and they are some of the most successful parts of
the novel in my opinion. I think she's given her main character a really strong,
interesting background. Sometimes it's hard to read and it's quite shocking
but I think it's a real triumph and it makes you want to read on
in the series and understand more about Amaia and the way she is. Another theme
in the novel as well is food. I was reading up about the author a little bit
and she went to a school for gastronomy at one point so it's not surprising that
perhaps she's used food to tie things together. So there are a lot of kind of
fraught family dinners, you know, around the roast and there are also the small
local delicacies, these little cakes that are left at the scene of the crime as
well. The supernatural plays a really big part in the novel as well there is some
really great scenes in there like there's a couple of scenes where they
are reading their cards or like tarot cards and the atmosphere is just really
tense and the scenes really work. There's also the Basilone which is a
like forest-dwelling folk-creature, kind of humanoid in its look, so you're
kind of always wondering how that pertains to the case as well. And also
a lot of the the bodies are found in these wooded areas so there's a lot of
reason for the police to go down there into the woods and again
the author creates a really great atmosphere by using these supernatural
elements and these kind of natural surroundings. As someone who doesn't
generally read or enjoy that much supernatural fiction it really worked
for me, I didn't find it too much at all. I thought
you know it worked well in the tradition of authors like you know James Oswald
and John Connolly; crime with a little bit of supernatural twist. So I thought
that really worked for the book. One of the things the author does really well
is her female relationships. She captures the way that women talk, women
communicate with each other really well. It's also a great juxtaposition
between Amaia being a woman in a man's world in the police force
whereas the village that she's from seems to have so many strong female role
models you know that the male characters do tend to play second fiddle to the
females in in this particular book and I think that's really interesting
viewpoint to have to read about. And also you know to read a book from another
culture that I don't really know about I feel like I'm learning something and
it's quite fresh in that way. The good news is that all of the books are
translated into English and are available at the moment, I think the only
thing that we're waiting on is the small size paperback of the third book, that's
not out until May, and yeah I really thoroughly enjoyed them. I thought it's a
really strong start to a crime series, quite fresh as well, very modern. I think
that anyone who likes a good crime mystery will definitely engage with this
and again it's interesting to read something from another culture, from
Spain, I don't really know too much about just yet. But yeah I would encourage
anyone to give it a try but thank you very much for listening to me today and
I will see you next time. Bye bye.