The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain.
The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain. A fatal traffic accident leaves an absconding Russian gangster dead. In his Range Rover, the police find more than eight million euros, drugs, compromising DVDs and a gun. As the August heat increases, Falcon is sucked into a turf war between Russian mafiosi. The ramifications stretch deep and wide into both the organised crime industry and the intelligence community, in Spain and elsewhere. There are connections to the unresolved Seville bombing at the heart of Falcon’s last big case. And it gets grimly personal when the eight-year-old son of his lover is kidnapped.
This is a big, serious thriller with echoes of le Carré. Falcon is a dark and driven protagonist who champions the vulnerable, especially children, almost against his will. The plot is a Hydra; as soon as you understand one part, it sprouts another tendril in its place. The narrative is frequently confusing but there’s a taste of authenticity about it, for Wilson writes with an impressive sense of inside knowledge, both about contemporary Seville and about its criminal underbelly.
The first sentence of Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report, translated by John Cullen (MacLehose Press, £18.99), has an almost tongue-in-cheek element of artifice: ‘My name is Brodeck and I had nothing to do with it.’ Set in a remote and unnamed village probably located between France and Germany in the aftermath of a war, the novel describes the murder of a stranger, a gentle artist, and its consequences; and in writing his report the narrator, recently returned from a concentration camp, is compelled to make a parallel investigation, this time into the disasters of his own life.
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