The Secret in Their Eyes - Softcover

Sacheri, Eduardo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1473632404 ISBN 13: 9781473632400

Publisher: John Murray General Publishing Division, 2016

Synopsis

Benjamín Chaparro is a retired law clerk still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation, recalling along the way the major players: Pablo Sandoval, Chaparro’s erratic yet brilliant partner; Ricardo Morales, the deceased woman’s husband, who never recovered from the tragedy; and Isidoro Gómez, the sickeningly obsessive suspect with whom Chaparro feels an uneasy kinship. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long,unrequited love for Irene, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice what it really means and in whose hands it belongs. This haunting crime thriller also explores the boundaries of love in all its forms: adoration, devotion and obsession.

About this title

About the Author:

EDUARDO SACHERI was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. His first collection of short stories, Esperándolo a Tito y otros cuentos de fútbol (Waiting for Tito and Other Football Stories), was published in Spain in 2000 under the title Los traidores y otros cuentos (The Traitors and Other Stories). Three of his other collections were published between 2001 and 2007, all of which have been bestsellers in Argentina. His novel La pregunta de sus ojos has been sold into eight territories, and the film adaptation, The Secret in Their Eyes, won the Academy Award forBest Foreign Language Film in 2010.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

I’m not sure about my reasons for recounting the story of Ricardo Morales after so many years. I can say that what happened to him has always aroused an obscure fascination in me, as if the man’s fate, a life destroyed by tragedy and grief, provided me with a chance to reflect on my own worst fears. I’ve often caught myself feeling a certain guilty joy at the disasters of others, as if the fact that horrible things happened to other people meant that my own life would be exempt from such tragedies, as if I’d get a kind of safe-conduct based on some obtuse law of probability: If such and such a catastrophe befalls Joe Blow, then it’s unlikely that it will also strike Joe’s acquaintances, among whom I count myself. It’s not as though I can boast of a life filled with success, but when I compare my misfortunes with what Morales suffered, I come out well ahead. In any case, it’s not my story I want to tell, it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gómez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.
   Although the morbid interest my subject arouses in me isn’t the only reason why I’m writing these pages, it carries some weight and plays some part. But mostly, I suppose, I’m telling the story because I have time to tell it. A lot of time, too much time, so much time that the daily trifles whose sum is my life quickly dissolve into the monotonous nothingness that surrounds me. Being retired is worse than I’d imagined. I should have known it would be. Not because of anything I knew about retirement, but because things we fear generally turn out
worse when they happen than when we imagined them.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray General Publishing Division
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1473632404
• ISBN 13: 9781473632400
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400