The genre comes back strong to bookstores and mixes big names with some surprises, spies with hitmen and serial killers, all enhanced with the return of some classics.

Even during this hiatus, the strength of the dark genre in its different versions (thrillers, noir social novels, political, espionage, detective…) is such, that sometimes it seems it could die from success or can lead strait to suicide.  But it is that same strength of writers, editorials, series and festivals that pull a community of readers, the one responsable for filling bookstore shelves with criminal novels. 

The publication last week of “El enigma de la habitación 622” (The Enigma of Room 622) from Joël Dicker (Alfaguara Publishers) tops the list.  Summer is here and readers want to get lost in intrigues and conspiracies.  In no other genre have there been new published novels of such level such as the ones starring the Norwegian Jo Nesbø, who leaves his beloved Harry Hole for a while (those novels have sold 400,000 copies just in Spain) in order to tell us about the life and problems of a hired killer, who is clumsy and almost lovable in “Sangre en la nieve” (Blood on the Snow) (Reservoir Books).  This is a different approach to this genre, one paying homage to the classics and with a certain healthy humor.

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