The Blind Man of Seville [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 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 Falcón 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 Falcón finds himself pushed to the edge of a terrifying truth…

It's Semana Santa in Seville, the Easter week of passion and processions. A leading restaurateur is found bound, gagged and dead in front of his TV. The self-inflicted wounds tell of the man's struggle to avoid the unendurable images he's been forced to watch. When confronted by this horrific scene the normally dispassionate homicide detective Javier Falcon is inexplicably afraid. What could be so terrible?

The investigation into the victim's turbulent life sends Falcon trawling through his own past and the ferociously candid journals of his late father, a world-famous artist. Painful revelations churn up Falcon's unreliable memory and more killings push him to the edge of terrifying truth. And he realises that this is not just the hunt for the all-seeing killer who knows his victim's secret lives but also the search for Falcon's missing heart.

From the Gold Dagger award-winning author of 'A Small Death in Lisbon', a novel that combines the tension of a psychological thriller with the emotional intensity of a literary tour de force.

Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping and advertising in London and trading in West Africa. He is married and divides his time between England, Spain and Portugal.