The Blind Man of Seville - Hardcover

Wilson, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151008353 ISBN 13: 9780151008353

Publisher: Harcourt, 2003

Synopsis

Detective Inspector Javier Falcón is transfixed by the brutalized face of murder victim Raul Jiménez in his Seville apartment. On his shirtfront, littered like exotic petals, are the man's eyelids, and so the victim’s relentless horror becomes the beginning of Falcón's own.

An old photograph at the murder scene prompts Falcón to read a set of journals left by his famous father, the artist Fransisco Falcón. He discovers that he'd never known the father he'd always loved, and as the case unfolds, Falcón's mind unravels as all the old certainties are undermined. More victims fall but neither the evidence nor the secrets of the victims' lives give Falcón the vital breakthrough he needs. The pieces of the puzzle finally fall together when Falcón finds the missing section of his father's journals--and becomes the killer's next intended victim.

With The Blind Man of Seville, Robert Wilson's unparalleled combination
of suspenseful storytelling and keen understanding of the ambiguities of the human soul confirm his place as one of the best mystery writers in the world today.

About this title

Review:

After trying his hand at spy fiction in The Company of Strangers, Robert Wilson returns to his detective-thriller roots with The Blind Man of Seville, a grimly bewitching and character-driven yarn about people confronting their most hidden horrors.

"It was only right that there should be at least one murder in Holy Week," muses Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón as he's called out during Spain's Semana Santa festivities to probe the death of a prosperous Seville restaurateur, Raúl Jiménez. The deceased was found strapped to a chair with his eyelids removed, facing a television on which had been showing a video of him entertaining prostitutes. Jiménez's heart had failed as he struggled to escape. This murder is "more extraordinary than any I have seen in my career," Falcón tells the businessman's widow, as he embarks on an investigation that will lead to the slayings of a hooker and an art dealer, and force the homicide cop into a game of wits against a killer obsessed with the contradictions between illusion and reality. Meanwhile, Falcón is himself obsessed with the long-secreted journals kept by his late father, a famous painter, whose brutal acts during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent hedonism in North Africa shaped Javier's life... and will make him the killer's next target.

Wilson's plot turns rather creakily on the coincidence of Falcón discovering a photograph of his father among Jiménez's things. And lengthy excerpts from the elder Falcón's diaries, while they reveal links between the book's secondary players, and are interesting for their portrayal of wartime Europe and postwar Tangier, nonetheless hobble this story's pace and distract from the modern crimes at its center. Still, there's a poetic edge to this author's prose that makes even his most gruesome or tragic scenes worthy of rereading, and in Javier Falcón--a lonely outsider who shadows his ex-wife and has a perplexing aversion to milk--he creates a police protagonist as satisfyingly and humanly flawed as any since Zé Coelho, from Wilson's outstanding A Small Death in Lisbon. --J. Kingston Pierce

Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2003, 0-15-100835-3

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0151008353
• ISBN 13: 9780151008353
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448