Who is Elisa Morán? It could be any woman and, in fact, it has been Anne Frank, Anna Karenina, Mrs. Dalloway and the tormented Catherine Earnshaw, from Wuthering Heights. She could also hide behind any man, just as she did with the adventurer Adam, the scientist Barbicane and Captain Nicholl, the three protagonists who travel From the Earth to the Moon with the help of Jules Verne.
No character in fiction escapes her method, the Elisa method, a unique literary transformism that leads her to become the heroes and heroines of the novels that Paradigma, the publisher she works for, commissions her to translate. Thus, they dress, think and behave like the characters that inhabit them, in addition to recreating the fictional universe of each story in their own home.
Once the multiple identity of the protagonist is known, the following question arises: who could be fed up, very fed up, with this working method? Well, Joaquín, her husband, a university professor who no longer knows who she married or where she lives and who decides to file for divorce just at the moment when Elisa is preparing to translate Agatha Christie’s memoirs.
A corpse then appears in a recycling plant and a police investigation begins with all the ingredients of the genre and a choral cast typical of Christie’s novels, in which Elisa herself is a suspect and at the same time an amateur investigator.
The novel is articulated like a Cluedo game that captivates and amuses, while making us reflect on the dissolution of identity and the influence of books on our lives. Written with humor and with constant references to current events, “The Elisa Method” can be defined as a literary thriller, not only for its connection to great works and its celebration of the queen of mystery, but also for its narrative rhythm, the solid construction of the characters, the care and precision of the language, and thanks to a structure that hooks the reader from the beginning.
Maeva offers readers this cozy crime with an environmental background and set in Madrid coinciding with Agatha Christie’s double anniversary: the fiftieth anniversary of her death and the centenary of her disappearance. “The Elisa Method” recreates this enigmatic event in the biography of the British author, today considered the best-selling novelist of all time.
Title: The Elisa method
Author: Mamen de Blas
Pages: 256
RRP: €19.90
Binding: Paperback