Blind Man of Seville (Javier Falcón Books) - Softcover

Wilson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156028808 ISBN 13: 9780156028806

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2004

Synopsis

Called to a gruesome crime scene, Inspector Javier Falcon is shocked and sickened by what he finds. Littered 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 him to read his late father's journals, he discovers a disturbing and sordid past. Meanwhile, more victims are falling. While Falcon struggles to solve the case, he finds the missing section of his father's journal-and becomes the murderer's next intended victim.

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
"Splendid ... Wilson has a talent for digging beneath the skin to explore psychological and emotional nuances." --New York Daily News

"This splendid . . . novel from Robert Wilson is consistently stunning, intriguing, and arresting."- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0156028808
• ISBN 13: 9780156028806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448