Latin American Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature, Latin American Fiction, Multicultural Detectives - Fiction, Police Stories

Southwesterly Wind

Name: Southwesterly Wind
Author: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
ISBN: 9780312424541

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Benjamin Moser

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Overview

Chief of the Copacabana precinct Espinosa is more than happy to interrupt his paperwork when a terrified young man arrives at the station with a bizarre story. A psychic has predicted that he would commit a murder, it seems, and the prediction has become fact in the young man's mind. As the weather changes and the southwesterly wind — always a sign of dramatic change — starts up, what at first seems like paranoia becomes brutal reality. Two violent murders occur, and their only link is the lonely, clever man who had sought Espinosa out a few days earlier for help.

In Southwesterly Wind, the third in this atmospheric, erotic series featuring the inimitable Inspector Espinosa, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza once again "breathes fresh air into the crime novel genre." (Los Angeles Times)

Synopsis

Fascinating...seductive." --The New York Times Book Review

Chief of the Copacabana precinct Espinosa is more than happy to interrupt his paperwork when a terrified young man arrives at the station with a bizarre story. A psychic has predicted that he would commit a murder, it seems, and the prediction has become fact in the young man's mind. As the weather changes and the southwesterly wind -- always a sign of dramatic change -- starts up, what at first seems like paranoia becomes brutal reality. Two violent murders occur, and their only link is the lonely, clever man who had sought Espinosa out a few days earlier for help.

In Southwesterly Wind, the third in this atmospheric, erotic series featuring the inimitable Inspector Espinosa, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza once again "breathes fresh air into the crime novel genre." (Los Angeles Times)

"Beautifully sad and seductive."--Chicago Tribune
"Beguiling and ingenious."--Kirkus Reviews
"One of the pleasures of reading Garcia-Roza derives from watching how he thwarts our narrative experiences. Throughout Southwesterly Wind, he shuffles and reshuffles a limited deck of secondary characters to assemble startling patterns. [A] wry and poetic voice."
--Maureen Corrigan, Newsday

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a bestselling novelist who lives in Rio de Janeiro.

The New York Times

Although this repressed mama's boy is not nearly as interesting to us as he is to Espinosa, it's fascinating to watch the inspector put his mind to the problem, studying it psychologically while working it pragmatically -- all without neglecting his customary walks through a city whose beauty never fails to lift his melancholy soul. — Marilyn Stasio

About the Author, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a bestselling novelist who lives in Rio de Janeiro.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Fascinating...seductive." —The New York Times Book Review

"Beautifully sad and seductive."—Chicago Tribune

"Beguiling and ingenious."—Kirkus Reviews

"One of the pleasures of reading Garcia-Roza derives from watching how he thwarts our narrative experiences. Throughout Southwesterly Wind, he shuffles and reshuffles a limited deck of secondary characters to assemble startling patterns. [A] wry and poetic voice." —Maureen Corrigan, Newsday

The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

The weather, perhaps a stand-in for fate, has a hand in the tentative outcome of Southwesterly Wind: An Inspector Espinosa Mystery, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's third psychologically acute crime novel (after 2003's December Heat), translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. A troubled young man, Gabriel, comes to the skeptical Espinosa for help because a psychic predicted he'd kill someone before his next birthday. The Rio de Janeiro cop has to take the claim more seriously when two murders linked to Gabriel occur close to the predicted date. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A fortune-teller predicts that Gabriel, a thirtyish administrator, will commit murder before his next birthday. As the year progresses, Gabriel slowly unravels under the burden of the prediction, until he is driven to the office of Inspector Espinosa, where he confesses to the potential for crime. This third installment in the series (following December Heat) takes Espinosa into repressive, middle-class Rio de Janeiro, peopled with conservative parents and their secretive adult children. While billed as "An Inspector Espinosa Mystery," this is hardly a traditional police procedural but more an investigation into the nature of crime and its damaging effects on all that it touches. Fans of the existential Espinosa will delight in the interweaving of his personal life with the investigation. Garcia-Roza, fast becoming known as the master of Rio noir, delivers a taut novel in tight prose, well translated by Moser. For all mystery collections.-Brian Kenney, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A prediction kicks off a gravely loopy third adventure for Rio de Janeiro's Sergeant Espinosa. It's never easy turning 30, but it's particularly stressful when the Argentine psychic who crashed the 29th birthday party for a young business executive named Gabriel predicted that he'd kill someone before the year was out. Now that the fateful birthday's looming, frantic Gabriel calls on Sergeant Espinosa (December Heat, 2003, etc.) to lift the apprehension from his shoulders. But Espinosa can think of nothing to do except assign Detective Welber to follow Gabriel around-a tactic more likely to provide a witness to violence than head it off-and beat the bushes for the fortune-teller, who, when he's finally unearthed, insists that he's not a psychic and he's not Argentine. In Garcia-Roza's crafty hands, the plot thickens-Gabriel purchases a handgun, ostensibly for self-defense; his possessive mother, Dona Alzira, starts stalking his romance-minded coworker Olga; Espinosa strikes up an amatory friendship with Olga's friend Irene, who aptly notes that "this sounds like a case for a psychoanalyst, not a policeman"-without ever exactly heating up, even though two fatalities will make Espinosa take the non-psychic's prediction very seriously indeed. More routine, despite its clever premise, than Espinosa's first two cases, but still a beguiling and ingenious introduction to the magical world of Garcia-Roza's Rio, in which places have considerably more solidity than people.