Jeffrey Archer returns to Spain with "Over My Dead Body"
In real life he is Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare. In politics first, and in literature later, he's simply Jeffrey Archer, established since the BBC brought his first novel, "Not a penny more, not a penny less", to the screen. His tumultuous career in politics - member of the House of Commons and later and still of the House of Lords, vice-president of the Conservative Party and close collaborator of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher - served to sharpen his powers of observation, sharpen his gift for intrigue and perfect the irony, humour and hypocrisy, typically British, with which he endows the characters in his novels.
Not all his books are published in Spain, but the latest has just arrived: "Over My Dead Body" (Ed. Harper Collins, 317 pp.), which, like many of his previous books, also aspires to become a bestseller.
"Careful what you wish for", "The Sins of the Father", "Mightier than the Sword" or "The Best Kept Secret" are the great stories constructed by Archer, whose highlight among his 37 published novels is perhaps "Kane and Abel", translated into 33 languages and also taken to television screens in a hundred countries.
"Over My Dead Body" also has all the ingredients to become a film as thrilling as the novel itself, a story of murder, revenge and betrayal that deserves to be described as masterful.
Archer always starts writing the first drafts of his novels on the island of Mallorca. In this case, the blue waters that bathe it and the magnificence of its landscapes have particularly inspired Archer, who sets the beginning of the plot in London. In the British capital, the Metropolitan Police have created a new Unsolved Murders Unit to catch the criminals that no one has been able to find. On the table they have three victims, three cases, and all the killers are ready to strike again. On the ground, Detective William Warwick will mix strategy, planning and action at breakneck speed, which introduces the reader to a sensation similar to that experienced in the meta-universe, by the way the correct word instead of metaverse, which is unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent in our language.
The centre of the plot revolves around the multimillionaire art collector Miles Faulkner, convicted of forgery and theft, and declared dead two months ago. Through this character and that of Detective Warwick's wife, the author also introduces us to the tempestuous world of collectors, who are capable of ruin and/or death for the mere possession of a work of art, which they want to be their absolute and exclusive possession and contemplation.
The monumental background of the veteran Jeffrey Archer is evident on every page of this novel. Whether it is his own career in politics, his time in prison after a typical British-style scandal, the kind of scandal that brought down a government or at least forced the resignation of a member of Her Majesty's Parliament who was caught lying, the fact is that Archer gives us a fascinating insight into a whole range of worlds that are a priori closed. Throughout its pages and characters it is easy to deduce that the author has been up to the palaces, down to the cottages, spent many a pub and tavern hour, and been in the thick of intrigues of all kinds in which money and politics intertwine, and where women occupy spaces as daring and decisive as those traditionally attributed exclusively to men.
