The Ignorance of Blood Book

As a sweltering Seville recovers from the shock of a terrorist attack, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón is struggling to find the bombers. The death of a gangster in a spectacular car crash offers vital evidence implicating the Russian mafia in his investigation, but it pitches Falcón into the heart of a turf war over prostitution and drugs. Now the target of vicious hoods, Falcón finds those closest to him are also coming under intolerable pressure: his best friend, who’s spying for the Spanish government, reveals that he is being blackmailed by Islamist extremists, and Falcón’s own lover suffers a mother’s worst nightmare. He might be able to bring the perpetrators of the bombing to justice, but there will be a devastating price to pay.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In his 2003 novel, The Blind Man of Seville, the British writer Robert Wilson introduced us to Javier Falcon, a Spanish chief inspector who confronted not only crimes that were often rooted in Spain's history but also secrets from his family's past. Three outstanding Inspector Falcon novels followed: The Vanished Hands, The Hidden Assassins, and now The Ignorance of Blood, the concluding volume. But it was clear from the outset that this was not a straightforward crime series (Wilson himself calls it a quartet of interlocked books). Falcon is too introverted a hero and the world he inhabits too unstable for the reader to be left with a sense of ease, let alone comfort.

Yet there is nothing hard-boiled about this fiction either. For all their brutality, Wilson's novels are psychologically complex and overwhelmingly compassionate. His characters are never merely types or his scenes merely set pieces. In The Ignorance of Blood, for example, the interrogation of a monstrous killer -- a predictable climax in any thriller -- quickly veers off course. " . you must understand that this is my job," the assassin, Sokolov, tells his polite interrogator, "I was given the names of people I was required to kill, but I did not always remember them." When reminded of a recent victim who was dismembered with a chain saw, Sokolov replies "The two who did that were animals, but they were brought up on brutality. They know nothing else." A tidy scene becomes untidy as Wilson makes us contemplate, however briefly, the inner lives of two incidental sadists.