The Good Suicides: A Thriller
*Starred Review* Life is never easy or straightforward in Hill’s Barcelona. In this second Hector Salgado novel (following The Summer of Dead Toys, 2013), the Barcelona police detective is still on the sidelines, punishment for his savage beating of human trafficker Dr. Omar. He’s also sidelined from the investigation of his wife Ruth’s disappearance, and he’s wrestling with being a single parent to his teenage son. But when employees of a trendy cosmetics company return from a “team-building” exercise and begin to commit suicide, Hector is finally brought back into the game. Meanwhile, Leire Castro, Hector’s smart and ambitious assistant, on leave awaiting the birth of her child, begins an unauthorized reinvestigation of Ruth’s disappearance and finds a link to Omar as well as to the national scandal of Spain’s “stolen babies.” Hector encounters Lola, his lover when he met Ruth, and she aids his investigation while squelching any possibility of resuming their relationship. And through it all, characters ponder, each in his or her own way, a pervasive sense of dread and of impending societal collapse, driven by Spain’s disastrous economic problems and income inequality. That dread feels like a Catalan analog to the angst that plagued Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander. Stylistically, Hill employs the literary equivalent to what soccer fans call “tiki-taka,” the intricate and mesmerizing short passing game used by Spain’s national team. It’s not easy or straightforward, but The Good Suicides is also mesmerizing. --Thomas Gaughan