A Small Death in Lisbon

New York, N.Y. Berkley Books, 2002. Second printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. Second front cover. [10], 451, [3] pages. Map. Winner of the Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel. Although this novel is based on historical fact, the story itself is fiction. Robert Wilson (born 1957) is a British crime writer currently resident in Portugal. He is the son of an RAF fighter pilot, and has a degree in English from Oxford. Wilson is the author of the Bruce Medway series, set in and around Benin, West Africa, and the Javier Falcón series, set largely in Seville, Spain. He is also the author of the espionage novel The Company of Strangers and A Small Death In Lisbon, which consists of a historically split narrative, and won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999. He was shortlisted for the same award again in 2003 for The Blind Man of Seville, the first in the Javier Falcón series. The second novel in the series, The Silent and the Damned (titled: The Vanished Hands in the United States), won the 2006 Gumshoe Award for Best European Crime Novel, presented by Mystery Ink. 1941, a Berlin factory owner, forced into the SS, has arrived in Lisbon. His mission: infiltrate the bleak mountains of the north where an insidious battle rages over an element vital to Hitler's blitzkrieg. The first seed of greed and revenge has been planted. Late 1990s, Inspector Ze Coelho has been recruited to investigate the sex murder of a teenage girl in Lisbon. The inquiry will take Coelho back across a bloody swath of history to the scene of an older crime, buried among a fascist past--and to a motive buried even deeper. And once unearthed, past and the present will converge with chilling implication and unfathomable consequences. Derived from a Kirkus review: The murder of a teenaged minx opens up a mystery that reaches back to the darkest secrets of wartime in this double-decker winner of the British Crime Writers’ 1999 Golden Dagger Award. Inspector José Alfonso Coelho wouldn’t even have been assigned to the case if Catarina Oliveira’s corpse hadn’t been dumped on a beach so close to the home he shares with his own teenaged daughter, Olivia. But now Zé finds that the beach was only the last stop in a short, sad life full of dozens of sexual encounters with a long line of men include at least two members of the band she once performed with—both of whom finished with her only a few hours before her body was found. The case is certainly sordid, but Zé would be even more disturbed about it if he were privy to a parallel tale Wilson is unfolding in interleaved chapters: the saga of Klaus Felsen, the Swabian peasant who clawed his way up the ladder to manufacturing under Nazi patronage and whose 1941 assignment to take charge of a massive exchange of gold for thousands of tons of Portuguese wolfram entangles him with a dangerous crew of Party members and fellow-travelers. What could clandestine shipments of Nazi gold and materiel have to do with the sex killing of a promiscuous teen half a century later? Even readers initially skeptical of the hoary convention of juggling two time frames will be sucked in as eagerly as Felsen’s other conspirators as the inexorable march of history pulls his two stories closer and closer together. It’s an added bonus that shrewd, self-deprecating maverick Zé Coelho is a wonderfully engaging detective, and that Portugal-based novelist Wilson writes with an economy and perceptiveness that bring each sorry participant to both stories squirmingly alive. Condition: Very good.

Keywords: Jose Alfonso Coelho, Catarina Oliveira, Murder, Sexual Violence, Klaus Felsen, SS, Nazi, Wolfram, Clandestine Operation, Smuggling, Ze Coelho, Police Inspector, Detective

ISBN: 0425184234

[Book #80187]

Price: $15.00

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