La red púrpura / The Purple Web
The fight to finish off The Purple Web will push the Case Analysis Brigade to the limit and, in a way, it may even destroy the Brigade itself. A race during which Ángel Zárate will see Elena Blanco slowly breaking down, tormented because her son can be part of that horror. But what would not a mother do to save her child?
A small townhouse in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Madrid. The last days of a hot summer. Alberto Robles has to order his daughter to get out of the pool while his wife, Soledad, is trying to get her teenage son, Daniel, to come down from his room and help her set the table for dinner. It could have been a night like so many others. But tonight, everything will fall into pieces. Inspector Elena Blanco, in charge of the Case Analysis Brigade (BAC), bursts into the house of Los Robles. Convinced of what she does, she goes straight to Daniel’s room, followed by the rest of the agents. On the computer screen of the teenager there is the confirmation of what they feared: the boy is watching a live snuff show in which a girl is tortured by two hooded men. The efforts of the agents to try to locate the place from which it comes are unsuccessful. Helpless, they can only witness how the torture continues until the death of the girl whose name, in that moment, they are not even able to know. But she was not the first victim. How many have died at the hands of the Purple Web in similar shows? That is the conclusion reached by the Brigade agents after investigating this sinister organization with which they came into contact for the first time in the case of The Gypsy Bride. For months they have been collecting information about this group that traffics in videos of extreme violence on Deep Web, the hidden side of the Net. And during all this time, Elena Blanco has not told anybody what she discovered: that her son, Lucas, who disappeared when he was only a child, is perhaps a part of the Web. Perhaps he has become a monster. Could her son be one of the hooded men torturing that girl? Elena does not know if she will have the courage to face up to the answer to this question. But, inevitably, the truth will be getting closer and closer to her. The video that they managed to intercept on Daniel’s computer will serve the agents to gradually surround The Purple Web. However, the new discoveries will make them realize that this torture was only the tip of the iceberg. That the perversion of the human being is capable of reaching extremes they never imagined.
Who is Carmen Mola? Does it matter? Her novels captivate us by their overwhelming originality, make us want more, much more when, horrified, we realize that we are on the last page.
From the very first page, Carmen Mola, whoever she is, proves to have her own voice and that, be it noir or any other genre means a lot. Perhaps it is half of the success. Or more.
The noir novel either mutates or insulates itself. Carmen Mola, is a mutating writer. The bad thing about her is that you cannot invite her to a festival.