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Synopsis
It's Semana Santa in Seville, the Easter week of passion and processions. A leading restaurateur is found bound, gagged and grotesquely murdered in front of his TV. Self-inflicted wounds tell of the man's struggle to avoid the unendurable images he's been forced to watch. At this horrific scene the normally dispassionate homicide detective Javier Falcón is inexplicably afraid. What could be so terrible?
The investigation into the victim's turbulent life sends Falcón trawling through his own past and the ferociously candid journals of his late father, a world-famous artist. Painful revelations churn up Falcón's unreliable memory and more killings push him to the edge of terrifying truth. And Falcón realizes that this is not just a hunt for the all-seeing killer who knows his victims' secret lives but also the search for his own missing heart.
From the Gold Dagger award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon, a novel that combines the tension of a psychological thriller with the emotional intensity of a literary tour de force.
Publishers Weekly
Proving that even the most talented authors can have an off day, Wilson (A Small Death in Lisbon, etc.) has come up with a long, dense, often brilliantly written but finally off-putting and depressing story, which starts with the grisly murder of a Seville restaurant tycoon. Parts of the novel work wonderfully: an interview between Javier Falc"n, the chief of Seville's homicide squad, and the victim's young widow, crackles with wit and electricity as she gets more out of him than he does out of her. And Falc"n (whose late father, a famous painter, had links to the dead tycoon going back to their days in the Foreign Legion in Tangiers during the Spanish Civil War) is often a fascinating figure-when he's not imploding with the weight of his discoveries about his father's past or the stress of his job and a recently failed marriage. Descriptions of a ranch where fighting bulls are bred and of a bullfight are worthy of Hemingway, as are scenes from life in Seville during Holy Week. But in the end, there's too much blood, too many old journals, too much torture and depravity to absorb and process into art and/or entertainment. (Feb. 3) FYI: A Small Death in Lisbon won a CWA Gold Dagger Award for Fiction. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.