PC

I really enjoyed this sophisticated, convoluted, mystery. Set in Buenos Aires, a struggling novelists hires a beautiful and talent secretary to take dictation. Only she's also secretary to Kloster, Argentina's reclusive and most successful novelist. Both novelists develop an obsession with the young girl, but with very different outcomes. Kloster's moment of madness triggers a series of events in which he loses his privacy, his wife and his daughter in rapid succession. Luciana's nightmare, on the other hand, takes a decade to evolve, during which her lover drowns, her parents are poisoned and her brother stabbed to death by a jealous husband. Only then does Luciana return to the struggling novelist to elicit his help to protect her younger sister...and what enfolds is an oblique story of obsession, love and revenge but the reader never really knows which character trait should be assigned to which character. This book is head and shoulders better than Martinez's first outing as a novelist, The Oxford Murders.

Read June 2008