Hans-Peter Schneider is very good at imitating voices. He does so often, especially to emulate the pleas of those who have the misfortune of having fallen into his hands: "The sound of a woman who cries is music" to his ears. He is tall, pale and has no hair on his body, eyelashes included, because of a genetic disease. His smile reveals the silver fillings of his fangs ("Facing and smiling, it looked like a white ermine"). Organ dealer and owner of several brothels, his favorite weapon is obsidian scalpels and a liquid cremation machine in which he undoes the bodies of his victims so as not to leave any trace of his heinous crimes.

It is the robot portrait of the sadistic villain who aspires to succeed Hannibal Lecter in the collective imagination and in the trajectory of Thomas Harris , the writer who created the most famous cannibal of popular culture. Now, after 13 years without publishing a single line, the novelist returns with Cari Mora (Sum of Letters), which is a new thriller exploration of an unhealthy relationship between a psychopath and a heroine with surprising coping skills.

She is not Clarice Starling, but Colombian Caridad Mora , recruited by force at age 11 by the FARC guerrillas. Now she is 25 and has been a refugee in Miami for almost a decade, alternating her work at the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station with the care and cleaning of houses. He is "quick, skilled and strong" and one could say that he has more resources than McGyver. Among many other things, during his years as a guerrilla he learned to shoot all kinds of weapons and prepare zarigüella soup. It is not someone with whom one would like to have problems.

The point in common is the old mansion of Pablo Escobar in Bahía Vizcaína. Cari Mora is in charge of monitoring the house, converted over the years into a bizarre film set for rent full of mannequins, daring horror movies and an electric chair from the Sing Sing jail. What is unknown is that, buried in the basement of the house, there is a safe with a security system loaded with explosives to protect the half-ton of gold that the patron kept there.

Schneider wants to get the loot and, incidentally, join Cari Mora to his inexhaustible list of victims. Schneider's diabolical aura even has olfactory consequences: "A sulfur scam that came from him, like the smell of a burning town with dead inside the houses . " Meanwhile, she allies with a gang of thieves based in Bogotá to get ahead of the plants of the guy who tries to kill her.

On paper is a thriller , of those that are recreated with truculent images and liters of blood. But beneath the surface is also a crude reflection on the reasons that lead immigrants to leave their countries of origin and the results of constant pressure on them from Migra , the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service.

In case it had not been clear throughout the 300-odd pages, which are read in a sigh, in the thanks Harris puts it black on white: «I want to thank especially this place, Miami, salty and beautiful, a deeply American city built and maintained by people who came from other places, often on foot ».

"Reading his prose is like slowly running his hand through cold silk," says Stephen King of Harris's style, although, everything must be said, it is also not something to consider, given the proverbial generosity with which the master of terror He praises among his colleagues. Even so, with the author of The Silence of the Lambs, the chill lurks on every page: the violence bursts into the phrases and dialogues with the same normality with which Hannibal Lecter devours a human liver paired with Chianti .

The figure of Harris, capable of prolonging the validity of Lecter until the era of the series, is that of one of those authors devoured (never better said) by his own creation. This former journalist raised by two devoted farmers in Jackson (Mississipi) decided in 1981 not to grant interviews again , fed up with questions about his favorite psychopaths. In fact, in Red Dragon he took his fictional revenge with a pen that asked too many questions: he had just been tied to a wheelchair, with his lips cut and burned alive.

Now, with about 50 million copies sold worldwide and life resolved thanks to the lucrative agreements for his film and television adaptations, Harris renounces the character that led him to fame. Perhaps it is because, as the narrator once said of Cari Mora, "the monsters know when they have been recognized, just like the bored."

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