The Silence of the Rain – Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Ever since my final outing with  Aurelio Zen, I have been searching for another detective to fill the void in my heart.  I think I may have found him. What is not to love about Inspector Espinosa?  He’s a man of impeccable taste

“I love American literature: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and especially Melville.  “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a masterpiece, and not a word about opium or murder,”

He gets better.  Inspector Espinosa browses second-hand book shops in his lunchtime and struggles to control Mount TBR!

 

Could these belong to Inspector Espinoza?

He spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with his books at home, or at least trying to make it look as if he had tried. After an hour , he realised he was just shifting piles.  Rearranging the chaos.

 
Been there? Done that? Me too  —> 

So now that I have established Inspector Espinoza as my soul mate, let’s cut to the chase.

In a parking garage in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, Ricardo Carvalho climbs into a car and kills himself. Yet when the police arrive at the scene, his death looks like a case of robbery gone wrong, since the victim’s gun and briefcase are nowhere to be found. Enter Espinoza and the case, which wasn’t murder to start with, soon turns into something horrific. Details are kept quite sparse – there’s nothing more terrifying than the imagination.

Espinoza is a star and, as his name indicates a bit of a phlosopher. Experienced enough to know everything is not as it seems The murderer knows that too. For as soon as Espinoza follows a new lead, it is closed down. It’s that structure that proves to be the ultimate flaw as Garcia-Roza writes himself into a tough corner, resolved only by the most ludicrous – and at the risk of being targeted by unwished for spiderbots, I shall use the word – pornographic ending. The author sure knows how to bring things to a climax.

I’m obviously not in tune with the judges of Brazilian fiction. The Silence of the Rain won both Nestle and Jabuti prizes in 1997.

  for the ending,

  otherwise.

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