A psychopath who can convince you that he has no choice but to kill

BarcelonaThis will be the first summer of vacation-vacation that Toni Hill (Barcelona, ​​​​1966) will take practically since the pandemic. The last few have been dedicated to frantically writing the The Executioner's Trilogy (Grijalbo), which now closes with The White Death, the definitive resolution of the four-year standoff between serial killer Charlie Bodman and the criminologist who unmasked him, Lena Mayoral.

AfterThe last executioner —where the murderer executed the victims with a vile garrote— and The hour of the wolf, now the villain is out of jail again, hiding in a small town near Belfast, where, coincidentally, a terrible murder has just occurred, sparking far-right protests. That's precisely where Hill spent last summer, living in the house where she would place her psychopath. Meanwhile, in Barcelona's gentrified Eixample district, the criminologist is experiencing her best professional and life moment with Deputy Inspector David Jarque and two stepdaughters, although the latent threat of the monster is always present in the background.

Together they are working on a new case: the kidnapping of a five-year-old girl, daughter of separated parents. "I already had a great antagonist and that allowed me to create a smaller yet more universal story. I wanted to tell the story of 21st-century families and the relationships that are established between the ex-partner, the new partner, the children, and put it all in a thriller", explains the author, a specialist in crime novels since his successful debut with The Summer of Dead Toys (2011), which was published in about twenty countries.

"The genre poses an engaging game for the reader, the resolution of a mystery, but you can talk about whatever you want. I love setting the metronome of thriller and that many things happen that are not trivial," explains Hill. The White Death There's more everyday naturalism than ever. "What happens when children bother you in your new life? Sometimes life would be easier without this bond with your previous partner. Why would your partner's children love you, and why do you have to love them? And at the same time, we live in the century of childhood, dedicated to our children, which can be more of a burden to be a parent.

The Origin of Evil

The weight of childhood in our lives is one of the themes that hovers throughout the trilogy, which explores the origin of evil. "What turns us into monsters? Love? Hate? What drives a normal person to commit a crime?" monster. Nobody is a monster 24 hours a day. Anyone monster, up close, there's a touch of humanity to him," he says. His psychopath even goes to therapy to get to know himself better; the problem is that his lies unleash his urge to kill even more. Hill, who studied psychology, assures that his degree has helped him not to spill it and to stretch the limits of plausibility. "I find reality boring. I didn't want to create an archetype. The challenge was to create and live with a psychopath who can convince you that he has no choice but to kill. He has a very brutal personal magnetism, he would convince me," assures the writer.

Until a couple of years ago, Toni Hill combined writing with translation. For the first time in his career, he published a novel as well as being an editor at Penguin Random House, of best-selling authors such as Ildefonso FalconesThis has forced him to discipline himself by getting up at 4 a.m. for months to make time to write. "I've always been a writer and something more, like most authors. I'm still late with my submissions. The difference is that now I know that when people ask me for something, they mean it," he says with disarming candor.