The Good Suicides

Starred review from April 7, 2014
Rich, nuanced characterizations distinguish Hill’s impressive second thriller featuring Barcelona Insp. Héctor Salgado (after 2013’s The Summer of Dead Toys). Five months after Gaspar Ródenas, an employee of Alemany Cosmetics, murders his wife and infant daughter and then commits suicide, Sara Mahler, a laboratory technician at Alemany, throws herself in front of a subway train. Gaspar and Sara’s colleagues are convinced that one of their own is killing people connected to the cosmetics company and disguising the murders as suicides. Strangely, their terror is not strong enough for them to betray their loyalty to Alemany by disclosing their suspicions to Salgado, who investigates the supposed suicides. Meanwhile, the cop’s partner, Leire Castro, begins a secret inquiry into a cold case: the disappearance of Salgado’s estranged wife, Ruth Valldaura. Readers will feel both disgust and sympathy as the carefully manicured facades of the inspector and the employees crack under the pressure of the mounting death toll.

July 15, 2014
In frigid Barcelona, senior membersof a cosmetics company are dying by what appears to be suicide, each havingreceived an email warning accompanied by a disturbing photo of dead dogshanging from a tree.Inspector Hector Salgado is stillreeling from the events in Hill's terrific debut, The Summer of Dead Toys(2013), in which his strong-willed wife, Ruth, left him for a woman and thendisappeared. An Argentinian who recently relocated to Spain, he's smoking toomuch and sleeping too little. The suicides, including that of a young Austrianwoman who leaped in front of a train, followed a company retreat in a housedeep in the woods. That's where the dogs met their sad fate. While Salgadoinvestigates the deaths, Leire Castro, a pregnant young cop on maternity leave"due to some rogue early contractions," takes it on herself to lookinto Ruth's disappearance. She's convinced that Salgado is too close to thecase to conduct a careful investigation. She revisits his violent confrontationwith a doctor involved in a trafficking scheme and befriends his likable14-year-old son, Guillermo. This book isn't as gripping or thematically rich asits predecessor; Hill follows the multiple-suspect Agatha Christie model a bittoo closely. But his gallery of characters is exceptionally well-drawn-Salgadois one of the more appealing world-weary police detectives in crime fiction-andBarcelona (where the author lives) provides a fresh backdrop for the action.Another strong effort by the Spanishnovelist, who again sets us up for the next installment of the series with atantalizing ending.

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May 1, 2014

Haunted by personal loss (Ruth, his ex-wife, disappeared six months ago), Barcelona's Insp. Hector Salgado remains dedicated to his work. When a suicide of a young woman employed at a boutique cosmetics company comes across his desk, he investigates. Troublingly, another of the firm's employees committed a gruesome murder-suicide a few months earlier. Holding evidence that suggests foul play, Salgado probes deeper into the company's files. The link is a photo of dead dogs sent to the employees, accompanied by a threatening note. Readers are privy to the thoughts of the remaining workers involved, enough to make them all look suspicious, and definitely enough to build a sweaty tension and unease. Salgado's team races against the clock and more information about Ruth's case comes to light, opening up disturbing possibilities. VERDICT Hill's atmospheric sophomore entry, a best seller in Spain, should make you double-check your catalog for the first title, The Summer of Dead Toys. The characters are intriguingly complex and the author skillfully pulls the rug out with a flourish at the end.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
Life is never easy or straightforward in Hill's Barcelona. In this second Hector Salgado novel (following The Summer of Dead Toys, 2013), the Barcelona police detective is still on the sidelines, punishment for his savage beating of human trafficker Dr. Omar. He's also sidelined from the investigation of his wife Ruth's disappearance, and he's wrestling with being a single parent to his teenage son. But when employees of a trendy cosmetics company return from a team-building exercise and begin to commit suicide, Hector is finally brought back into the game. Meanwhile, Leire Castro, Hector's smart and ambitious assistant, on leave awaiting the birth of her child, begins an unauthorized reinvestigation of Ruth's disappearance and finds a link to Omar as well as to the national scandal of Spain's stolen babies. Hector encounters Lola, his lover when he met Ruth, and she aids his investigation while squelching any possibility of resuming their relationship. And through it all, characters ponder, each in his or her own way, a pervasive sense of dread and of impending societal collapse, driven by Spain's disastrous economic problems and income inequality. That dread feels like a Catalan analog to the angst that plagued Henning Mankell's Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander. Stylistically, Hill employs the literary equivalent to what soccer fans call tiki-taka, the intricate and mesmerizing short passing game used by Spain's national team. It's not easy or straightforward, but The Good Suicides is also mesmerizing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)