Last Christmas, I trusted Dolores Redondo to take a break from anything anxiety-inducing. And I was right, because, almost in its original form, Waiting to be Forgotten (Destination, 2022) achieves this—and I won’t go into whether it’s “forgetting” or “forgetting”—a detective novel with a clear and regular long-sentence syntax, unhurried, unhurried, reinvents itself in the construction of a plot with beautiful prose that you will enjoy reading. Everything is for you to feel the deepest disgust, the hope that love requires, until it passes through a melodramatic point as a concession to the genre itself and above all to the reader.
A detective novel with intrigue from the start, but not knowing who the Glasgow serial killer is, but knowing what steps must be taken to catch him: “Catch the Beast” (p.101). Dolores Redondo takes us through that British city in the 1960s and 1970s to Bilbao in the 1980s (“Húmeda, sucia y amoral como Glasgow”, p. 150), where the so-called murderer seems to be acting. And always with the will to interpret evil, through the reliable use of an omniscient narrator who tells facts about the past (pp.
As a preface, the author relates the plot of the novel to his own personal history. This dose of reality is successful when it comes to the fact that some of the events he describes are also based on the story of that murderer. He then presents us, through chapters of varying length, with certain decisive notes, on the one hand, in accordance with the genre of detective work, the style of acting of the murderer, the type of fetishism he pursues with his victims, and his family history, almost always in the form of a retrospective (flashback), as well as victimization and its connection to Bilbao. various theories about its arrival (“perfect hunting ground”, p. 155). On the other hand, he recreates for us the side of the good guys, led by Noah, the British policeman who is also very special, nearly dead and still doomed, by successfully diagnosing its obsolescence. With Bilbao setting. Next to him will be ertzaina (village keeper) Mikel Lizarso (p.229) and Rafa, the “helper” boy with cerebral palsy, who becomes one of the discoveries of the novel.
The Bilbao of the summer of 1983, with its big week, is the scene of this grueling persecution and a success that never seems to come; mediated by the coexistence of terrorism and everyday life in the streets and bars (“He was Noah) admired the way the city learned to live with conflict” p. 220. In Bilbao, Noah, Mikel, and Rafa find the serial killer continues to act and is masterfully narrated. Before he can stop him from committing one of the most brutal murders, he will try the near impossible to verify and catch the serial killer, exacerbating the grief as the reader experiences everything from the victim’s point of view (pp. 197-199); simply ingenious.
With the symbology of Noah and Noah and the flood (“I think I’m waiting for the flood” p.223) and the water running in the city for days, everything is heading towards an epic end because the point was made to coincide with the peak of history with the real flood reality in Bilbao that same year. So there is a structural creation that is very cinematographic, perfect for the reader’s delight, and is reflected in the title itself.
And why should you read this novel? Considering that it belongs to the detective genre as it presents a literary will that allows both the characters, the landscapes and the different characterizations to complete the daring formation of the facts; because the author goes back to his best pages with that, but I have to blame him for making the killer listen to David Bowie.