The world of crime is vast, but there are writers who focus their words on a vast range of crimes. One of them is the Argentinian Claudia Piñeiro, whose novels I have commented on several times. She is an expert at putting her characters through experiences of extreme anxiety that lead some to cross the line of legality and others to reveal what they wanted to remain hidden. Perhaps I am mentioning the basic dialectic thriller. That momentum makes us read them.

In her latest novel – her tenth, among other types of books such as plays, children’s books and stories – the author returns to the character of her debutante, Your (2005). I argue that you don’t have to read one to understand the other, because a writer can’t make those demands of his readers unless they’re experts. And this does not prevent the existence of connected books, in series, with the same protagonist and other links. The autonomy of each work is a requirement of unity.

Time of flies (2022) is a story that stands out for several qualities, closely related to the style and structures that Piñeiro visits. He narrates from multiple voices, but what could be a neutral third person in this novel is done from a psychic interior that focuses a specific view on the facts. So Inés, the killer Yourshe who killed her husband’s lover to end the pain of infidelity, serves her 15-year sentence and returns to life on the outside to share an uncomfortable existence with another ex-convict, until her past gets in the way and threatens her condition as a mother, all the while separated from her only daughter left from a failed marriage.

Protagonist, partner, clients, daughter. This is another study of femininity, such as often came from Claudia’s pen. And precisely in order to broaden the perspective to all the possibilities of women’s thinking, our author finds the smartest source: chapters with epigraphs taken from the tragedy Medea, Euripides which, at first glance as a chorus, but actually as a gathering, gathers the most opposing voices and controversies about the female gender. In these seven chapters are concentrated the keys to meaning that the readers – and I am reluctant to write this word only in the feminine gender because men would like to immerse themselves in the viewpoints of the other half of humanity – are up to them to choose as their own. And since the transcendence of any topic can get a touch of humor, Claudia does not deprive us of laughter.

Many parts of the novel are based on dialogues. Words that come and go without remark because the characters are so well delineated that there is no question of assigning them to the appropriate dialogue. This quality can be found in the stories of those who live with an ear for the community: an older, more educated, upper-middle-class woman uses the Spanish language to escape her friend who, like many naive and poor people, ended up in prison for selling drugs at retail.

Suffering shapes personalities, but not always for the worse, just as marital love is not an absolute value. Novels that dive into the chiaroscuro of life are those that understand it. (OR)