The Blind Man of Seville [Anglais] [Broché]

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 --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Proving that even the most talented authors can have an off day, Wilson (A Small Death in Lisbon, etc.) has come up with a long, dense, often brilliantly written but finally off-putting and depressing story, which starts with the grisly murder of a Seville restaurant tycoon. Parts of the novel work wonderfully: an interview between Javier Falc¢n, the chief of Seville's homicide squad, and the victim's young widow, crackles with wit and electricity as she gets more out of him than he does out of her. And Falc¢n (whose late father, a famous painter, had links to the dead tycoon going back to their days in the Foreign Legion in Tangiers during the Spanish Civil War) is often a fascinating figure-when he's not imploding with the weight of his discoveries about his father's past or the stress of his job and a recently failed marriage. Descriptions of a ranch where fighting bulls are bred and of a bullfight are worthy of Hemingway, as are scenes from life in Seville during Holy Week. But in the end, there's too much blood, too many old journals, too much torture and depravity to absorb and process into art and/or entertainment.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Trust the author of A Small Death in Lisbon to come up with another quirky thriller. Even as he investigates a bizarre serial killer who divests victims of their eyelids, Detective Inspector Javier Falc"n rediscovers his father through his journals. Of course, the killer and the journals end up connecting.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Be forewarned of the unrelieved bleakness of this novel about how the sins of the past haunt the present. In Seville, Homicide Detective Javier Falcon investigates a series of ghastly murders in which the killer removes the eyelids of his victims to force them to see that which is beyond bearing. As the case proceeds, it becomes apparent to Falcon that it is entwined somehow with the life of his late father, a renowned artist, whom Falcon learns, to his increasing horror, had much to hide. The book is dense and grim, and Sean Barrett's monotonous reading does little to keep the listener focused and engaged. It's a serious and challenging work, but expect no help from the narrator. M.O. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition CD .

At the center of this absorbing procedural/thriller is a crime so grotesque that it almost sends Wilson's seventh novel into the realm of horror fiction. Detective Inspector Javier Falcon, a detective with the Grupo de Homicidios de Sevilla, is called to a large, expensive apartment in the Edificio del Presidente towers. A man has been murdered in a peculiarly cruel way there. It is evident that part of his torture was being forced to watch videotaped scenes of his own and his wife's infidelities. The crime scene upends Detective Falcon's life when he discovers a photo of his late artist father there. Falcon conducts a double investigation, into the murder and those that follow, and into his father's past, which holds the key to the brutal slayings. Wilson, awarded Britain's Gold Dagger Award for his A Small Death in Lisbon (2000), is able to hold reader interest at an almost unbearable pitch of excitement throughout this shocker with exquisite plot pacing and intriguing character revelations. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

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.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

A beautifully crafted psychological thriller steeped in Spanish Mystery.
Introducing JAVIER FALCON, a detective set to rival Rebus and Alex Cross as a hero for crime lovers everywhere. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Robert Wilson is recognized as a master mystery and thriller writer

“Wilson has a preacher’s gift for the language of pain and great compassion for people caught up in the crucible of war.”
-New York Times Book Review

“Wilson demonstrates, as Graham Greene did long ago, that thrillers are the liveliest, most gripping, most thought-provoking literary enterprises going today. The most readable too, when penned by a master spinner like Wilson.”
-LA Times Book Review

“The British seem to breed terrific mystery and thriller writers with astonishing ease—think of everyone from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to Agatha Christie, to John Le Carré and P.D. James. The latest import about to catch fire in the U.S.? Robert Wilson.”
-NY Post

"A highly evocative writer whose sense of place is nearly as acute as his talent for characterization."
- The Raleigh News and Observer


“Le Carré’s equal when it comes to plotting, piling surprise upon surprise and keeping the reader guessing until the bittersweet ending.”
-Denver Post
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .

Robert Wilson is the author of six novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of 1999 from Britain's Crime Writers Association. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He lives with his wife in an isolated farmhouse in Portugal.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Relié .