El Artesano

A dark and atrocious "thriller", of an overwhelming harshness difficult to forget. Sensitive souls, be on your way. November 19, 1991. Yugoslavia sinks into the spiral of the Balkan war. An organized group of Serb paramilitaries massacre a family in the village of Erdut, Croatia. Only a small child survives. Twenty-five years later, lawyer Irena, embarks on a hunt for these bloodthirsty monsters. April 1, 2017. An abominable double crime is perpetrated against a woman and her baby, whose bodies, treated like pieces of a work of art, are found in Le Havre. Vladimir Radiche, an unscrupulous police captain, is in charge of the case. The victims were tortured and murdered by the Artisan, a ruthless and sadistic being who sells the films of his abuses on the internet, through the deep web. INTERLACED STORIES When the trajectories of the tenacious Irena, and the detestable Vladimir Radiche intersect, the unbearable truth comes to light little by little. Trapped in a maelstrom of violence, the two protagonists encounter the cruelest face of society as they enter an underworld where organ trafficking, crimes against humanity, serial murders, and religious and political sectarianism run rampant, and where the threads of evil inexorably unite to weave the rope that traps the reader, taking him to the extreme. After the success of "The Demoniacs", Mattias Köping, considered one of the masters of the darkest noir series, surprises us with his new novel, "The Artisan", winner of the 2019 Découverte Iris Noir de Bruxelles Prize and the Bloggers' Polar Prize, among other distinctions.