A country that doesn’t acknowledge its past is destined to repeat its mistakes.
Why murder a sick old man nearing retirement? An investigation into the death of a professor at the University of Barcelona seems particularly baffling for Deputy Inspector Norma Forester of the Catalan police, as word from the top confirms she’s the one to lead this case.
The granddaughter of an English member of the International Brigades, Norma has a colourful family life, with a forensic doctor husband, a hippy mother, a squatter daughter and an aunt, a nun in an enclosed order, who operates as a hacker from her austere convent cell.
This blended family sometimes helps and often hinders Norma’s investigations.
It seems the spectres of the past have not yet been laid to rest, and there are people who can neither forgive nor forget the cruelties of the Spanish Civil War and all that followed.
Many thanks to Ewa Sherman from Corylus Books for inviting me to take part in the blog tour for Black Storms and to the publisher for sending me a copy of the novel.
Black Storms is a fairly short book but despite being under 300 pages long, it examines some complex topics. It is a detective novel which is light on the procedural side of business – which is just as well because Detective Inspector Norma Forester's eccentric family means she sometimes has rather an offbeat approach to investigations
The book opens with the murder of an aged professor; it's not an especially violent death but it does seem particularly cruel because the old man is already dying of cancer. The identity of the killer is revealed to readers quite early in proceedings but the motive doesn't become clear until much later. In the meantime, Black Storms is as much about Norma's family as it is the case.
Her English-sounding name comes from her grandfather, Jack but the rest of the family are Catalan and they are the best part of the book. Her husband is a pathologist, her teenage daughter, an anarchist and her mother's a hippy. They are joined by Violeta's birth father and his boyfriend, and Aunt Margarida, who is the character I most enjoyed. She is a nun and chose to take her vows later in life, joining a closed convent. However, she manages to invent reasons to leave every so often and during her time away, plays bingo, enjoys more than a few drinks and goes to the movies. It's what she is capable of in her cell which is most impressive though; she certainly hasn't been left behind by modern life and her hacking abilities prove very useful. Norma herself is an often flawed character; I can't say I particularly warmed to her but she is certainly interesting.
The case itself has links to the country's turbulent past and is a reminder that the shadows cast by the Spanish civil war and the long years of dictatorship which followed, still persist. The balance between the lighter family scenes and the exploration of this brutal history is poignant and the eventual denouement is probably a realistic reflection of how an investigation such as this would really play out, given the complexities of seeking justice under such complicated circumstances. Not everybody is yet ready to fully confront the sins of the past, especially since so many people are connected in some way to the atrocities committed back then.
As a character-driven novel, Black Storms isn't as propulsive as some crime fiction; the prose has a tendency towards the verbose and I felt it would have benefitted from being tighter at times. That said, I enjoyed reading this nuanced, thought-provoking story – it's always intriguing to read translated works and to appreciate the difference in writing styles and themes examined.
Black Storms is published by Corylus Books, purchasing links can be found here.
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Her first crime series featuring the unidentical Masdéu twins has been translated into several languages (including English, published by Bitter Lemon Press), and her short story collection The First Prehistoric Serial Killer was longlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger Award in 2019.
She has won a number of national and international awards, including the Crims de Tinta for Black Storms.
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