Product Description

The first in Robert Wilson's Seville series, featuring the tortured detective Javier Falcon. The man is bound, gagged and dead in front of his television.The terrible self-inflicted wounds tell of his violent struggle to avoid some unseen horror. On the screen? In his head? What could make a man do that to himself? It's Easter week in Seville, a time of passion and processions. But detective Javier Falcon is not celebrating. Appalled by the victim's staring eyes he is inexorably drawn into this disturbing, mystifying case. And when the investigation into the dead man's life sends Javier trawling though his own past and into the shocking journals of his late father, a famous artist, his unreliable memory begins to churn. Then there are more killings and Falcon finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20616 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 'Crime writing at its very best, but it is also something more. It observes no limits, it begs no one's pardon. It excites, it surprises and it satisfies.This is a fine important novel' Literary Review 'Admirably paced and enthrallingly elaborate' Sunday Times 'The Blind Man of Seville is an ingenious and compelling thriller' Daily Telegraph 'This is powerful evocative stuff' Observer 'As an evocation of the emotional labyrinth of postwar Tangiers and as a tale of artistic drift, it's rather brilliant -- a detective story Paul Bowles never wrote' Guardian A wonderful, if dark and disturbing, literary detective novel' Time Out 'To call Robert Wilson's 'The Blind Man of Seville' a thriller is to do a grave injustice to an utterly stunning achievement.The central narrative of the detective on the verge of a nervous breakdown is a psychological thriller of real profundity. Wonderful!' Paul Preston, author of 'Franco'

The Times
‘Complex and fascinating’

Customer Reviews

Beautifuly, exotic and shocking thriller
This novel by the award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon, appears to have much going for it. The first draw is its rather curious title, the second is its exotic setting, Seville, Spain. Plus, the plot itself sounds rather fascinating…

Thursday 12th of April, and a leading restaurateur is found slain in his home. Tied to a chair in front his TV, he has been forced to view horrifically unendurable images. The horror of these scenes is evidenced by the self-inflicted wounds caused by Raul Jimenez’s desperate struggle not to watch. On top of that, his eyelids have been removed. The normally dispassionate detective Javier Falcon is shocked deeply, and becomes inexplicably frightened by this killer who seems to know, intimately, every single detail of his victim’s life. Never in his career has he confronted a scene so barbaric.

But, for Javier Falcon, the worst is yet to come. Because, in investigating the victim’s complex past, he discovers that it is inextricably connected with that of his own father, world-famous artist Francisco Falcon. The case eventually becomes not just a hunt for a killer clearly prepared to strike again, but a voyage of discovery for Falcon as he, through Francisco’s previously hidden journals, learns much about his father’s past and the dark secrets it hides…

This story, told through the dual narratives of fascinating diary extracts and standard third-person narration, is told expertly. Even though the first hundred pages or so grow slightly dull at times, and it takes a while to settle all the numerous characters in your mind, the pace soon picks up as we learn that the case has as much to do with the past as it does the present. The setting is described wonderfully, and the city of Seville is really brought to life, shimmering with vitality. I might even recommend this book for the setting alone.

The Blind Man of Seville contains the most beautifully realised, brilliantly sustained psychological portrait I have read in years. The lead character, Javier Falcon, is unendingly fascinating and gloriously chilly. The reader cannot help but care and get a little worried as his mental health gently seems to decline as he desperately tries to hold everything together in the face of affecting revelations concerning his present and past. When those revelations finally fully come to light near the finish, it is with a great sense of shock on the reader’s part. Indeed, the final hundred pages are absolutely wonderful, when everything falls into place and the reader realises the scale of what is being revealed.

This book is a brilliant, gritty thriller, and I’d recommend it highly. The writing quality is very good, but the prose itself doesn’t exactly sing. Instead, it has a rather detached coolness that fits surprisingly well. Part tense, exotic thriller, part examination of the effects of the past on the present, and part novel of ideas and of the natural of true art, I’d give this one a big thumbs up. A warning, though: if you don’t like brutality, this may not be for you.

(This book was well-and-truly ROBBED of the CWA Gold Dagger last year, an award it deserved without reservationg.)

Beautiful, haunting book
This is the first Robert Wilson novel I have read - and I am so impressed with the talent of this author.
What on the surface appears to be a run of the mill detective-hunts-psycho-killer novel , becomes something different, evocative, compelling, beautiful.
The book begins with a particularly savage murder, which homicide detective Javier Falcon is brought in to investigate. He finds that the murder ignites something within him, when he discovers that the murdered man was in Tangiers during the 40s & 50s when his own father (a respected painter) was in the city too.
What unravels is a deep tortuous look at his own family and past, where discomforting truths are revealed and Falcon has to re-assess who he really is....
This book will haunt you long after you finish it - yes the murder is brutal and there are scenes and perversions that may be upsetting to some - but it really makes you use that little bundle of grey cells you have. What do we base our lives upon? If everything that we come to believe in turns out to be false, where does that leave us? Do we truly know our own parents? or do we just accept the facet of their lives that they choose to show to us?
This wonderful introspection, complete with the evocative descriptions of life in Seville - makes this a cut above ordinary crime thrillers and a gem of a book just waiting to be found - if, of course, you dare enter.....

There are none so blind......
This is the best Wilson I have read and I've read them all. The book constantly reminded me of Costa Gavras' film "Music Box", in other words, a child's discovery of the horrific past of a loving and beloved parent.He cleverly weaves a web of discovery with the intersection of the father's diaries,the physical evidence of the police investigation and the memories of friends and family, until the complexity unravels during the last fifty pages, and we, too, see.
Mr Wilson is not a writer for the squeamish, but having just finished Anthony Beevor's "Stalingrad" I could only approve of the way in which he described the reality of the father's experience.What turns men into beasts? What turns artists into thieves? What do penance and pardon mean. These are some of the questions asked in the midst of death and betrayal in beautiful Seville.This is a dense and difficult book, but written admirably in dense and dark prose.