The Blind Man of Seville
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Spanish detective investigates a series of grisly killings in a crime thriller that maintains “an almost unbearable pitch of excitement” (Booklist).
Called to a gruesome crime scene, Inspector Javier Falcón is shocked and sickened by what he finds there. Strewn like flower petals on the victim’s shirt are the man’s own eyelids, evidence of a heinous crime with no obvious motive.
When the investigation leads Falcón to read his late father’s journals, he discovers a disturbing and sordid past. Meanwhile, more victims are falling. While he struggles to solve the case, he comes across a missing section of his father’s journal—and becomes the murderer’s next intended victim.
Combining suspenseful storytelling with a thoughtful exploration of the human psyche, The Blind Man of Seville is a terrifying and “consistently stunning” police procedural from the Gold Dagger Award–winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
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. FYI: A Small Death in Lisbon won a CWA Gold Dagger Award for Fiction.
