Given my ethnic origin and where I live, I wanted to love this book because it's by a contemporary Spanish author but I am afraid I only ended up liking it. There are too many hackneyed tropes and they detract from credibility, credibility for me being very important when reading a crime novel, I have to believe that it is true for me to enjoy it and, for me, this immersion never happened with this book. Serviceable but little more.

A brutal grisly murder. A maverick policeman with, of course, a troubled past and a volatile personality. Twists and turns and red herrings. All the ingredients of an enjoyable and entertaining police procedural – but essentially a run-of-the-mill one with the usual tropes and stereotypes. (And as an aside – in 2022 are we not beyond the stage of describing breasts whenever a female character is introduced?) I expected something more challenging from Javier Cercas, whom I’ve always considered a literary writer rather than a crime novelist. This one is the first of a trilogy about police officer Melchor Marin but to be honest I’ve had enough of him already. Melchor is centre-stage throughout and his backstory is explored at some length. He’s an interesting character but I didn’t find his past particularly convincing. We find out that he was inspired to join the police force after reading – and re-reading - Les Miserables, hence the title of the book, but presumably only those familiar with Victor Hugo will get that, and although it’s a nice conceit due to the moral complexities that Hugo explores in that novel, if the reader hasn’t actually read it then the references to Javert, with whom Melchor connects, are irrelevant. The book is well constructed and all is nicely, if rather laboriously, tided up at the end. The Civil War is still simmering in the background, as it does in so much Spanish literature, but it’s lightly handled. So all in all, a straightforward conventional police procedural but not much more than that.

Going into this I had no preconceptions since it was my first Cercas novel. It's a decent, if run-of-the-mill detective caper, with some rather gruesome scenes as well as some interesting real-world/non-fiction links.

I disliked the fact it was divided in two parts, which for me at least, meant the continuity was interrupted and my attention dwindled slightly. I also thought the 'whodunnit' was rather telegraphed and I actually figured it out as a result.

I will seek out Cercas' other work but will probably resist the urge to dip into any sequels related to this character.

My thanks to NetGalley and Quercus Books for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Whilst admiring aspects of this book overall it didn’t work for me. I found the opening torture and murder of a very elderly couple deeply unpleasant and whilst I appreciate that a lot of detective novels break off to follow the (usually complex and grim) back story of the detective, here it felt disruptive of the plot. The framework of Hugo’s Les Miserables was interesting, but felt over-laid rather than integral and I thought the eventual resolution of the mystery was unconvincing- any resolution that relies on a detailed exposition by the perpetrator can feel lazy and it did here.

I think that this is the start of a planned series of novels, I won’t read any more.

Spanish author Javier Cercas begins his new Terra Alta series with the publication of Even the Darkest Night. Detective Melchor Marín is sent to a murder scene where a wealthy elderly couple was brutally murdered. Set in a small town in Catalonia , the murder investigation goes nowhere and is shelved despite Melchor’s protests. There are a number of chapters revealing Melchor’s life as a son of a prostitute, jailed for driving for a Colombian drug cartel and relocating to Terra Alta due to his anti-terrorist actions. If you like stylish police procedurals with rich characters and European flavoured noir, then this four-star rating is a delight. With thanks to Quercus Books and the author, for an uncorrected advanced review copy for review purposes. As always, the opinions herein are totally my own and freely given, without influence.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Quercus Books for an advance copy of Even the Darkest Night, a police procedural set in Catalonia’s Terra Alta featuring Melchor Malín of the Mossos d’Esquadra.

An elderly couple, the Adells, are brutally murdered in their home. As the couple were prominent in the area and the murders horrific a task force is established and then disbanded when they run out of clues and investigative leads. Melchor risks his job to continue investigating and pays a terrible price.

Even the Darkest Night is an interesting read with a more literary approach than is standard in the genre. I admit that I was baffled by all the references to Hugo’s Les Misérables, because I haven’t read it or seen the musical, and that is a bit of a problem because it’s Melchor’s favourite book. To be honest the references sailed over my head and I probably lost some of the impact of the novel because of it.

On the other hand I liked the murder investigation and the story of Melchor’s turbulent life which is gradually unwound over the course of the novel. They go hand in hand and share equal billing. The novel has a really strong start with the gory murder and Melchor’s early life. The tone is almost forceful and really pulls the reader in. I was fascinated by these first chapters and couldn’t get enough. Of course, the information feed slows as the novel progresses and the novel contents itself with Melchor’s reactions to events and, I suppose, non events. It get more philosophical and the literary allusions increase, so that part didn’t hold my attention so much. The end of the novel comes back to the way of the beginning in a rush of explanations and bitterness. I like the solution which is elegant in its use of genre tropes and, no, I’m not going to enumerate them.

The novel is told entirely from Melchor’s point of view and slips between the present and the past effortlessly with the scenes from his past being used to highlight his current world view. He is an interesting character, poacher turned gamekeeper if you like, having left prison after serving time and becoming a police officer. There is an aura of suppressed (and sometimes not so suppressed) violence to him and yet, he is a thinking man. In fiction I like him, in real life I think I’d be incredibly wary.

Even the Darkest Hour is a good read, if not quite what I was expecting.

I’m not sure how I feel about this story…. On one hand, I liked it a lot, but not enough…
I liked the mystery but it was not enough of a mystery. I easily guessed who had done it but even when I knew the whole story, it wasn't a satisfying resolution…
I thought Melchior's life story was interesting but the character wasn't interesting enough to make me care about what happened to him or his family… And when he has an opportunity to grow, especially in the way he relates to other people, he doesn’t…
It was a bit of a frustrating read, but interesting…

The title of this book tells us that the wonderful French writer Victor Hugo is likely to play a part. It comes from Hugo’s famous quote “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” This is true for the main character of this book who had had a very bad start in life being the son of a prostitute with no known father. He ends up in prison where he learns the joy of reading and in particular reading Victor Hugo. The book is quite complex and much as I am interested in the history of Spain and the Spanish civil war, it was the crime aspect of the book that hooked me. The ending left a bit to the imagination but nevertheless, this is a good read very much enjoyed by a friend of mine in its original Spanish. Thank you Netgalley!

Melchor had it tough growing up. Born to a prostitute who worked the area close to the Barcelona football stadium, he never knew who his father was. Eventually he drifted into crime and in due course was arrested and charged for his involvement with a drug gang. In prison he was introduced to books and, in particular, found some comfort amongst the pages of the Victor Hugo classic Les Misérables, a book he was to return to again and again and within which he was to see echos of his own life. And as fortune would have it, he found that he had a benefactor in the form of the lawyer who had acted as his defence counsel in court – a friend, it seems, of his mother.

I won’t go into how it came about, but suffice to say his life took a major turn for the better and with the help of his benefactor he found himself, some years later, working (strange as it may seem) as a police officer in a sparsely populated area called Terra Alta, in the region of Catalonia. Crime is rare here but one night he’s called to a horrific scene: three people murdered, two of them having been tortured horribly before being put out of their misery. The murder scene is the home of the owner of the largest business in Terra Alta. There appear to have been no witnesses and with no identifiable suspects it seems that perhaps this triple murder is to remain a mystery.

At this point there’s quite a lot going on: the ongoing investigation into the murders, a second mystery back in Barcelona that is constantly playing on Melchor’s mind and then another death which threatens to tip him over the edge. In addition to receiving updates on current events, we start to learn some of the history of the region, much of it linked to the Spanish Civil War. It’s a violent history, with the Battle of Ebro – the longest and largest battle of the war – having been fought here in 1938. In the bars and restaurants, amongst the elder members of the population stories from the war remain the most likely topic of conversation.

But despite all this, or perhaps because of this, the tale seemed to slow at its midpoint, its energy dissipating. Thankfully, the pace picked up again in the final section and this tangled web of a story started to edge toward an exciting climax. In this complex, convoluted tale there was never going to be a neat and easy ending and this proved to be the case. There is resolution, but not all loose ends are neatly tied off. My personal view is that this is okay, I don’t mind being left to imagine how certain elements played out. But with two significant mysteries remaining unsettled it’s possible that some readers might not feel fully satisfied.

This is a surprising departure for Cercas who moves away from his more literary writing to give us a lurid police procedural - there's a gory torture scene, lots of police who are more names than personality, a protagonist with a crowded backstory who has gone from prison to the police because he was inspired by reading Les Miserables... and a climactic long confession at the end built on one of those long-held revenge plots that has been simmering for years. I quite enjoyed it as a, effortless tube read but it's not what I expected from Cercas.

"“What doesn’t convince me is the theory that they were merely burglars.”
“Why not?” Deputy Inspector Gomà asks.
“Because it seems implausible that thieves would spend so much time torturing an elderly couple that way.”
“I agree,” Pires says. “The problem is that reality is full of implausibilities. It’s a bit different from novels that way, isn’t it?”
Melchor is accustomed to his commanding officers and colleagues making ironic comments about his reading habits. He’s not bothered by sarcasm and doesn’t rise to it often.
“Not good ones, no,” he says. “But bad ones are, yes.”
“Then you should read bad novels, Marín,” Deputy Inspector Gomà says. “You’d learn more. You’d learn for example that reality is a place where you find all sorts, including a whole bunch of nuts and psychopaths who don’t follow any rules. Much less the ones in novels.”
“Novels don’t have rules,” Melchor says gently. “That’s their charm.
But it doesn’t matter. Not even in a terrible novel would mere burglars have tortured the Adells. It makes no sense."

Javier Cercas has been to date one of a handful of authors in my pantheon, authors where I have read and will read all their books (translated into English). So I awaited the translation of his book Terra Alta with some anticipation. The original won the Premio Planeta de Novela, Spain's richest literary prize, albeit one awarded by a publisher and which tends to favour their own novels. The English translation Even The Darkest Hour is from Anne McLean.

Cercas is perhaps best known in the Anglosphere for his breakthrough novel, translated into English by Anne McLean as Soldiers of Salamis. But he followed this with a collection of fascinating “novels without fiction”, books where he explored a real moment in history or a real person, and asked questions, in a way only a novel can do, that have no definitive answers. His literary philosophy was explained in a brilliant series of essays translated by Anne McLean as The Blind Spot:

"The novel is not the genre of answers, but that of questions: writing a novel consists of posing a complex question in order to formulate it in the most complex way possible, not to answer it, or not to answer it in a clear and unequivocal way; it consists of immersing oneself in an enigma to render it insoluble, not to decipher it (unless rendering it insoluble is, precisely, the only way to decipher it). That enigma is the blind spot, and the best things these novels have to say they say by way of it: by way of that silence bursting with meaning, that visionary blindness, that radiant darkness, that ambiguity without solution. That blind spot is what we are.

In other words: in the end there is no clear, unequivocal, emphatic answer; only an ambiguous, equivocal, contradictory, essentially ironic answer, which doesn’t even resemble an answer and that only the reader can give."

However, rather disappointingly given this manifesto, Cercas here has essentially written a standard detective novel. As the TLS review put it "he has won Spain's most prestigious literary prize with what is certainly his least representative book".

Cercas does, to be fair, give his hero Melchor Marín a literary foundation. Son of a prostitute, father unknown, and a teenage delinquent who soon finds himself sucked into the drug trade, and imprisoned. His mother hires a close friend, a lawyer to defend him, who success in reducing his sentence and becomes something of a father figure to Melchor, particularly after his mother is murdered.

His life is transformed when, in prison, he reads Hugo’s Les Miserables, identifying not so much with Valjean as with Javert, the relentless detective and something of an anti-hero to most readers. He vows to train to become a police detective when he leaves prison, in part to be able to track down his mother’s murderers.

He manages (with the lawyer's help) to join the police force but although he finds someone who knew his mother well, and saw her get in the car from which she didn't return, he reaches a dead end. But travelling back to Barcelona he is caught up in a (fictionalised version of the real-life) terrorist attack in Cambrils in 2017.
In the novel it is Melchor who single-handedly kills all four terrorists.

For his own safety he is transferred to a quiet town in the Tarragona region of Terra Alta.

"He understood that this time away from Barcelona could be more than the conventional holiday he’d imagined, more of a holiday from himself, and he believed he understood Jean Valjean’s fleeting happiness when, at the beginning of Les Misérables , he changed his place of residence, left behind his ignominious convict past and began a new life as a new man, endowed with a new identity: Monsieur Madeleine."

As the novel opens he has lived there a few years, and is coming up to age 30. Now settled down in a relationship with the town's librarian (the two bond over her recommendations of various classic 19th and 20th century novels) he has a slightly troubled reputation as a maverick policeman, who takes extra-judicial action against those who are violent to women. He is called to the scene of a shocking crime, the brutal, almost ritualistic, torture and murder of an elderly couple, Terra Alta's richest business people.

There is also a political undercurrent with both the legacy of the Civil War, Cercas’s favourite topic, very much still dominating the region (the scene of the bloody and decisive Battle of the Elbo) as well as the modern day divides caused by Catalonian nationalism.

But it is hard to get away from the fact that a lot of the book is standard police procedural, with most of the cliches of that genre (including indeed the troubled detective hero)

"They say goodbye on the stairs and, while Salom goes down to the underground car park to get his car, Melchor heads for the office he shares with the corporal and the nine other members of the Terra Alta Investigations Unit (Sergeant Blai has an office of his own), a vast room with five desks, five computers and a bank of filing cabinets. He finds Corominas and Feliu there, two colleagues from forensics who are chatting and drinking coffee, who ask him if there is any news. Melchor tells them no, and since he knows that they should be at the Adells’ house, collecting clues, he asks them the same thing. Corominas, a big man with a round head and a boxer’s nose who’s on the heavy side, tells him there’s no news from there either and adds that they’ve come to the station to deposit the evidence they’ve collected so far."

A find it hard to judge how this would appeal to crime novel fans, although it didn't particularly seem to work as a mystery, the whodunnit solved, rather suddenly, about 2/3rds of the way through the novel and not in a particularly interesting way.

One I'm afraid that disappointed my expectations for one of my favourite authors.