Book Notes: Carmen Mola’s Gypsy Bride

Gypsy Bride is a bestselling police procedural by a mysterious Spanish author who writes under a pseudonym.

To those who love the genre (which is about zero people on this blog, it seems) I can explain exactly what Carmen Mola is like. She’s a Spanish Tess Gerritsen.

Gerritsen is the author of extremely gruesome novels about serial killers and eccentric, damaged women detectives who hunt them down. Gerritsen’s blood-curdling novels were turned into a comedic TV series Rizzoli and Isles but that’s not the author’s fault. She’s still the most lurid mystery writer I know.

Mola is clearly a great fan and is imitating Gerritsen for the Spanish public. It isn’t plagiarism. Mola is inventing her own gore. But she’s following Gerritsen’s model pretty faithfully. Gerritsen’s been neutered by the constraints of writing for the stupid show, so now the lovers of extreme ickiness in police procedurals can go to Mola instead.

By the way, Gypsy Bride is the only mystery/police procedural in Spanish that I read of my own free will and actually finished. I detest Hispanic mystery as much as I love the English-language version of the genre. But again, I only read it because it’s like reading Gerritsen in translation.