The Blind Man of Seville - Softcover

Wilson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007117809 ISBN 13: 9780007117802

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2003

Synopsis

New Spanish thriller from the Gold Dagger winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon, introducing Detective Inspector Javier Zurbaran

It’s Semana Santa in Seville, the Easter week of passion and processions. A leading restaurateur is found bound, gagged and dead in front of his TV. The self-inflicted wounds tell of the man’s struggle to avoid the unendurable images he’s been forced to watch. When confronted by 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 he realizes that this is not just a hunt for the all-seeing killer who knows his victims’ secret lives but also the search for Falcón’s 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.

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’ Philip Oakes, Literary Review

‘Admirably paced and enthrallingly elaborate’ Sunday Times

‘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

'The Blind Man of Seville is an ingenious and compelling thriller.’ Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph

'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' Chris Petit, Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0007117809
• ISBN 13: 9780007117802
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400