La muñeca / The Doll
When Ana asked Daniel’s help to throw her doll into the new municipal rubbish dump, she did not know that she would also throw away her childhood, that of her friends and also a part of life of every one of them and did not in the slightest imagine she would dump the future of her life into abyss as humid as it was dark. An unloved doll and a teenagers’ game in the purest King’s It style trigger off an incident which will mark the life of a group of friends.
A quarter of the century later during urbanistic developments in the town, some corpses appear in the old dumping site which will alter the present and awaken a sleeping past that never vanished and now stretches its limbs to claim a debt. The plot of the novel takes place in two time frames, where the innocence of adolescence blends with the weight of adulthood to colour and weave a sombre narrative in which the suspense, the thriller and the mystery genres strive for prominence. It is set in a coastal town of the peninsular south where the dead reclaim the names that are their due, the living try to forget the past and to hide the disturbing truth and where a police inspector with a tarnished past wants to redeem past mistakes by retracing twenty five years of darkness in search of truth.
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘭𝘭 perfectly balances three genres that respect each other so much that they rarely touch each other in a single work, let alone intermingle. This is the boldness of Guisado, who is not afraid to endow his first foray into literature with an admirable stylistic tension, with a good dose of horror, a thriller and the most classic detective story to keep the reader in suspense from beginning to end
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘭𝘭 is a must-read novel for lovers of the thriller genre. Reminiscent of It, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘭𝘭 does not disappoint at the beginning, nor in the middle or the denouement, absorbing elements of the formula that helped Carmen Mola to win the Planeta Award, but with enough personality to bring the plot, the action, the adventure, the fun and the delight to the south, to Rota.
In the story told as a disturbing thriller with a touch of mystery, we find a very well-woven plot, narrated in a very elegant way.
