The Ignorance of Blood (Javier Falcon Series #4)

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

In Wilson's insightful fourth and final Javier Falcón novel (after The Hidden Assassins), the intrepid Spanish homicide detective finds himself overwhelmed with the pressures of personal and professional entanglements. After a suitcase is recovered from a car accident containing several million euros and discs showing video footage of local council people in compromising positions, Falcón begins piecing together a vast international conspiracy that involves not only the Russian mafia and Islamic extremist groups but also implicates his best friend, Yacoub Diouri, a spy for the Spanish government. When the young son of his lover, Consuelo Jiménez, is abducted, Falcón comes to some startling revelations about his career, his relationships and his future. While convoluted plot lines initially slow the pace, patient readers will find the action-packed-and bombshell-laden-conclusion well worth the wait. As always, the richly described Seville backdrop is a plus. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Library Journal

In Wilson's fourth and final Seville thriller, Chief Inspector Javier FalcA³n tries to solve two cases, which end up intruding on his messy personal life. Set in September 2006, three months after the bombing of a mosque in Seville and the arrest of Investigative Judge Esteban CalderA³n for murder (The Hidden Assassins), this novel focuses not only on the many ramifications of those events but also on the accidental death of a Russian mafioso caught between two dueling crime bosses trying to corner Seville's drug trade and muscle in on a massive construction project. At the same time, one of FalcA³n's best friends, Yacoub Diouri, recruited as an agent by Spanish Intelligence, has penetrated the radical Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, only to learn that his son has joined the mujahideen. Yacoub's gay lover, a member of the Saudi royal family, may be in their sights. When someone kidnaps the son of FalcA³n's lover to blackmail the inspector, he finds himself stirring a lot of pots at the same time. Readers new to the series may find the complications overwhelming. For those patient enough to work through the details, however, this is a fitting end, with all loose threads firmly knotted.
—Ron Terpening

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
The accidental death of a Russian gangster sets demons of all sorts loose in this final installment in Wilson's Seville tetralogy. Only his death in a freak traffic accident has short-circuited Vasili Lukyanov's plan to shift his allegiance from Mafia boss Leonid Revnik to Afghan War veteran Yuri Donstov, whose heroin-smuggling scheme spells big rubles for everyone. The routine accident seems unconnected to Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon's ongoing investigation into the bombing of an apartment house (The Hidden Assassins, 2006, etc.), or his crusade to get to the bottom of his ex-wife's murder, allegedly by her husband, disgraced judge Esteban Calderon. Yet whenever he presses Calderon's girlfriend Marisa Moreno, the chief witness against the defiant judge, for details, he's warned by an anonymous caller to mind his own business. Eventually the threats escalate to a more baleful kind of pressure: the abduction of his on-again lover Consuelo Jimenez's eight-year-old son Dario. What could be worse than having to deal with kidnappers ready to kill the boy? Being caught between two sets of criminals, equally determined to bend Falcon to their will, both claiming to have Dario. It's no wonder that Falcon's hard-pressed to help his best friend Yacoub Diouri, an undercover agent who's infiltrated a group of Moroccan terrorists only to find that they've enlisted Yacoub's son Abdullah as a suicide bomber. Half a dozen other meaty, painstakingly interlinked subplots make this climactic volume as close-knit as a prose poem on counterterrorism. For fans of international intrigue, however, this capstone is the mother lode.
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.

Contemplation is, however, a rare luxury in The Ignorance of Blood, a relentlessly tense novel that opens with a visceral jolt and never loosens its grip. On a sultry September night, a Russian Mafioso rich in cash, cocaine, and incriminating sex tapes is fleeing one crime syndicate to join another when he is killed in a freak road accident outside Seville. Falcon is called to the scene and soon uncovers a fresh case of sex slavery, extortion, and the blackmailing of local officials. The case may be fresh but it is not new, not to Falcon. In his world there are no entirely new cases. There are instead old sins, long memories, enduring -- and often fatal -- connections to the past. Here, as in previous novels, Wilson elegantly folds these persistent themes of blood and memory into his serpentine plot, allowing the links between past and current crimes to surface incrementally and elliptically.

The Russian Mafia case, we soon learn, is somehow linked to the massive bombing that shook the city of Seville in June, a crime that Falcon has publicly sworn to solve. That connection leads Falcon back to Ernesto Calderon, the instructing judge who was forced off the bombing case when he was arrested for the suspected murder of his wife -- who happened to be Falcon's ex-wife. All of which sounds unlikely when summarized. But these individual dramas, so memorably developed in earlier Falcon novels, are efficiently revisited in the opening chapters of The Ignorance of Blood, and readers new to the series will soon grasp the shape, if not the full weight, of the puzzle's separate pieces.

"Personal crusades, Javier, are not advisable in police work," the imprisoned Calderon tells his visitor, Falcon, "Every old people's home in Spain probably has a retired detective gaping from the windows, his mind still twisted around a missing girl, or a poor, bludgeoned boy." Falcon's mind nonetheless remains fixated on the conspiracy behind the Seville bombing; one that involves Muslim extremists, a Spanish far-right Catholic political party, an American corporation with evangelical affiliations, a corrupt intelligence branch and now, Falcon suspects, the Russian Mafia.

Falcon's crusade becomes truly personal, however, when one of those tentacles reaches out for the young son of his girlfriend, Consuelo. That moment marks a turning point in the novel. Wilson's style has until then been almost brusque (there are all those connections to explain) and his scenes cinematically intense. The Mafia murder of a possible informer, for example, is all the more sickening for being sketched rather than portrayed. Discovering the carnage, "Falcon turned away with the slaughterhouse image burned into his mind....The saliva thickened to an eggy slop in his mouth. He sucked in the black night air, thick as bitumen."

Yet it can get worse. And it does. When Consuelo's son is endangered, we experience the accelerated momentum of a sudden and terrifying descent. This disturbing sensation is only intensified by a brief change of location, from Seville to London. There we see Javier meeting once again with Yacoub Douri, a reluctant intelligence agent who has infiltrated a North African terrorist group and who both reports to and confides in Javier. Far more than a spy, Yacoub is the closest thing that Javier has to a brother, and their conversations provide rare moments of reflection, both personal and political, in an otherwise driven novel. But even as Yacoub reveals himself to Javier and as Javier in turn tolerates the insults of British intelligence officers, Consuelo's world back in Seville implodes and horror intrudes.

Robert Wilson has said that he exposes his characters to psychological trauma in order to make them change (Falcon had a breakdown in 2001), but in The Ignorance of Blood he brings Falcon close to destruction. There is no time, in this fourth novel, for the psychotherapy sessions that in the past provided respite and illumination to him and to other key characters. Here the villains, some of Wilson's finest, largely set the pace and dictate the next move. Meanwhile fragments of espionage, terrorism, Mafia, and political corruption coalesce around Falcon's desperate investigation; one with a child at its center and his own salvation at stake.

The wonder here is not that Wilson manages his complicated plot so gracefully and convincingly -- past novels have proved him to be a master choreographer -- but that he does this while creating scenes so vivid that they force us to breathe the same air that Falcon breathes and to inhabit the same world of exhaustion and dread. Emerging from one confrontation, for example, Javier walks "out into the suffocating night, full of the uneasy susurrating of the trees and the low, distant threat of the city grinding out its future." (Seville continues to be a palpable presence in these novels). Yacoub, on a dawn mission at sea, notices that "The horizon quivered as if a meniscus had to be broken for the red orb to push up into the sky."

Towards the end of this final novel, Falcon observes, "Blood does something to an atmosphere: electrifies it so that other humans know to tread with care." Here the trail of blood -- spilled and unspilled --that Wilson has so carefully laid down in his Falcon quartet fades into the background as reporters crowd in for a climactic press conference and Falcon's superiors bask in unearned glory. "Mystery gone," Falcon sourly reflects, "quest terminated. All that remained was an overwhelming sense of loss and pointlessness." For him, perhaps, but certainly not for Wilson's fortunate readers. --Anna Mundow

Anna Mundow writes "The Interview" and the "Historical Novels" columns for The Boston Globe and is a contributor to The Irish Times.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780547335872
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: 6/11/2010
  • Pages: 422
  • Sales rank: 404,364
  • Series: Javier Falcon Series , #4
  • Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

ROBERT WILSON is the author of numerous novels, including The Company of Strangers and A Small Death in Lisbon , which won the Gold Dagger Award as Best Crime Novel of the Year from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece, Portugal, and West Africa.

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 7 Customer Reviews

  • Posted November 26, 2009

    Robert Wilson's last Best Book

    Robert Wilson is able to keep us in suspense throughout the book as with his entire Javier Falcon series. Better than that, he builds onto the characters and their emotional baggage throughout the series. So, by the time you get to the end of this book, you feel like you are satisfied that you now understand many of the subplots, and perhaps more than you wanted to know. Wilson is compelled to begin his books with blood and gore, which is initially quite repelling, only to settle into a suspenseful crime story that takes on many unexpected but relevant twists and turns.

    Wilson's considerable research of his venues and criminal enterprises is impressive and works well in all facets of his stories. It is relevant and fascinating at the same time. You can feel the summer heat radiating off the streets of Sevilla; smell the pungent air of the Moroccan souks. You can sense the ruthlessness of the jihadists as they control their subjects. He never leaves the reader very comfortable. Even the protagonist, Javier Falcon is ready to retire from it all. No wonder.

    I will miss this fine Spanish public servant, Javier Falcon. He has become someone whose character has been built in my mind event by event, crisis by crisis. He is human. He is professional and yet is pressured by circumstance to be even more human which would ultimately cause himself to fail as an officer of the law. He is someone with whom I would like to share a bottle of 2001 Muga Torres.

    I would like to thank Robert Wilson for sharing Javier with me. Too bad he has now retired. It would be delightful if he would come back to solve another crime, but that is probably wishful thinking.

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  • Posted August 29, 2009

    Matchless Style and Story

    Robert Wilson is distinctive for lack of a stronger word - his Javier Falcon novels have all been outstanding. This is the last Falcon novel according to the book jacket and that is sad. I will miss Javier and all the characters in the series but look forward to his next novel with great anticipation.

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