Manuel Marlasca novelizes "the untold" aspects of police investigations into open cases.

He has been a reporter for 38 years and only a novelist for two. But Manuel Marlasca (Madrid, 1967) has decided to tell "the untellable" in his second novel. 'Until ... you stay' (Destino) is a thrilling police intrigue, in the most literal sense, which unravels from within the meticulous and lengthy investigations of 'cold cases'. These are the disappearances or murders falsely closed that sometimes take years to solve and obsess the most experienced and committed police officers.

"If I tell you this, I would have to kill you, some police officer has told me," explains the veteran and seasoned crime reporter. Nevertheless, he allows himself to narrate in this fiction what "commonly and by common sense" he must omit in his reports. In this case, it starts with what seems to be the voluntary disappearance of a young woman. It turns into a tale about the blurred line that separates justice from revenge. It takes the reader into an underworld of life-or-death poker games in the so-called 'Royal Flush' operation, the ultimate move.

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"I do whatever I want with my characters and tell the untellable under the umbrella of fiction," Marlasca explains at the Police Headquarters in Madrid – a police complex some call 'The mess' – which he knows very well and which is a central setting of the novel.

He says this in front of Javier Galván Ruiz, the chief of police in Madrid. He is a professional with vast experience in disappearances and a high resolution rate for whom the perfect crime "does not exist." "Sometimes mistakes are made or it's impossible to prove, nothing more," he specifies.

The Worst Nightmare

"Being a victim of a disappearance is the worst misfortune for the victim's environment, who without their remains cannot begin or end their mourning," points out Marlasca, who admits being "obsessed with disappearances" since he covered that of Anabel Segura. He has novelized from real cases that in police jargon are called today 'high-risk disappearances'.

It is the second novel of group X that Marlasca created in his first fiction, 'You dance, I shoot' (2024). It is a group of the National Police "shaken by a tragedy." Specialized in homicides and led by inspectors Jimmy Valle and Julia Zaldívar, it has a human capital of 'cops' "with very heavy backpacks and covered in scars who solve most of the crimes they investigate."

"No cop is all good, just as no villain is all bad in the novel," clarifies its author. He confesses to having "stolen the soul of some police officers" who, "have their weaknesses and strengths." "Also those dark areas that we all have and don't want to come to light," he says.

"Murderers are usually ordinary people. Many have pets that they care for and love. In the famous Hare psychopathy scale, there are many murderers who score very low," he points out. "Most murderers are very normal people, I insist, who with a spark become criminals," he asserts. "I won't say that we are all potential murderers, but that spark can turn anyone into a murderer," he adds.

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"There are many murders caused by those uncontrollable explosions of violence. The least are premeditated. As Georges Simenon said, 'we are all like the murderer moments before committing the crime'," the author of half a dozen 'true crime' books remembers.

With more than three decades among police, criminals, and courts, Marlasca sings 'mea culpa' to acknowledge how "sometimes we give too much glitter to murderers in the media, to insignificant beings who want to become someone with their crimes," he says recalling the case of José Bretón. "He is a failure as a person, as a military man, as a husband, and as a father, but he was capable of murdering, burning, and burying his two small children to become someone and torment the mother."

"As a narrator, I have two obsessions: the verisimilitude and the rigor of journalism and the depth of the characters. I hope I have been faithful to both in this novel," proposes its author.

Facing the Abyss

With 'Until you stay' he wants to pay homage to community policing, "who risk their lives in each intervention." "When a GEO team breaks down a door, they know who will be behind it, the dimensions of the house, who occupies it, and what evidence they are looking for. But when two police officers get out of a Z car (patrol) they peer into the abyss. After knocking on a door they don't know if they will be received with gunshots or if someone is going to blow up with an explosive charge."