‘Silence that kill’ by Jordan Harper: fast and deep

After his experience as a screenwriter For television series and imposing himself to the success of his first novel, ‘The education of Polly McClushy’ (Salamandra, 2023), Harper proposes on this occasion a plot that oscillates as a pendulum between his two leading characters, Mae and Chris, which Once they were lovers.

She is a peculiar communication agent, employed by a murky network of companies, who faces the murder of her boss the day after she offers to reveal a great secret; And he is A disenchanted plundering, section because of corruptionwith little desire to live and a garbage chain in the private security sector. Together they form a perfect tandem, especially for what it has original when it comes to becoming a guide for the reader through a metropolis in free fall and an cast that merps without mercy a society in which morality and ethics shine for his absence.

Selected as the best black novel of the year, among others, by ‘The New York Times’, and winner of the prestigious Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award, ‘Silence that kill’ places its author at the height of the two great contemporary narrators of the crime in California, responsible for their universal projection: James Ellroy and Michael Connelly; And, on the other hand, it adds to the tendency of make the city more than a scenario Weight, which is formed to support the plot, and transform it into the absolute center of the intrigue, whose objective in this case is Los Angeles radiograph to the millimeter, without overlooking a shadow.

Thus, Harper’s novel allies with the São Paulo of ‘Brazilian Psycho’ (Salamandra, 2024) and the new delhi of ‘The age of vice’ (Alfaguara, 2023) to form a troic that, in recent years, presents the city as a living organism, of which the human being limits himself to being part, without more power of individual action than that of an insignificant cell.

To these credentials that guarantee a prominent place in the most current ‘noir’ panorama, Harper adds a curious feature of his own style, born of the contradiction: and that is that in ‘silences that kill’ speed and depth they live in a way difficult to explain and, of course, to achieve, because, from the first page, to the thickening and breath That luxury hotels, infinite traffic jams and ice cream meetings in skyscrapers of unimaginable height, adds a C skates, a C is addedAutivating observation capacity And above all of analysis, which does not give up stopping in the smallest, almost fleet Who experiences them and, however, Jordan Harper puts at our feet.