The Blind Man of Seville - Softcover

Wilson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007117817 ISBN 13: 9780007117819

Publisher: Harper, 2007

Synopsis

The first in Robert Wilson’s Seville series, featuring the tortured detective Javier Falcon.

The man is bound, gagged and dead in front of his television.The terrible self-inflicted wounds tell of his violent struggle to avoid some unseen horror. On the screen? In his head? What could make a man do that to himself?

It's Easter week in Seville, a time of passion and processions. But detective Javier Falcón is not celebrating. Appalled by the victim's staring eyes he is inexorably drawn into this disturbing, mystifying case. And when the investigation into the dead man's life sends Javier trawling though his own past and into the shocking journals of his late father, a famous artist, his unreliable memory begins to churn. Then there are more killings and Falcón finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth...

About this title

Review:

The very title The Blind Man of Seville raises some of the most interesting questions in this original thriller, which breaks the mould of the police procedural far more than seems likely in its seemingly conventional early pages.

A series of men and women are killed by torture and their eye-lids or eyes taken from them in the process--but they die if anything of an excess of sight, of being forced to watch the unendurable. As Inspector Falcon does the legwork of the case, and gets more and more teasing messages about sight and light from the ingenious and vicious killer, we find ourselves wondering whether he himself is the blind man, if there is something he is refusing to see.

At the same time, he is clearing the studio of his dead painter father, and reading journals containing a horribly plausible version of the man he thought he knew--a bisexual gangster who fought for Fascism and the Nazis in Spain and Russia. And around him Seville is having its intense and bizarre Holy Week celebrations, with bullfights and with vast puppets of sacred figures looming around the streets.

This is a book of surreal intensity which plays by all the rules of the detective novel and yet gives the reader so much disturbingly more. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

Praise for The Blind Man of Seville

‘Crime writing at its very best, but it is also something more. It observes no limits, it begs no one’s pardon. It excites, it surprises and it satisfies.This is a fine important novel’ Literary Review

‘Admirably paced and enthrallingly elaborate’ Sunday Times

'The Blind Man of Seville is an ingenious and compelling thriller’ Daily Telegraph

'This is powerful evocative stuff' Observer

'As an evocation of the emotional labyrinth of postwar Tangiers and as a tale of artistic drift, it's rather brilliant – a detective story Paul Bowles never wrote' Guardian

A wonderful, if dark and disturbing, literary detective novel' Time Out

‘To call Robert Wilson's ‘The Blind Man of Seville’ a thriller is to do a grave injustice to an utterly stunning achievement.The central narrative of the detective on the verge of a nervous breakdown is a psychological thriller of real profundity. Wonderful!’ Paul Preston, author of ‘Franco’

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0007117817
• ISBN 13: 9780007117819
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 579