The Blind Man of Seville

Detective Inspector Javier Falcón is transfixed from the moment he sees the blood-streaked face of murder victim, Raul Jiménez, in his Seville apartment. When he finds, littered on the bloody shirt front like exotic tropical petals, the man's eyelids, he imagines the relentless, unflagging horror and it becomes the beginning of his own.

But as he sifts the evidence and comes across old photographs of the victim's earlier life in Tangier after the war, he finds that he too is dragged back into the past. Falcón himself had been brought up in Tangier. His father had become famous there. A Spanish artist of world reknown, Fransisco Falcón, had died recently leaving a large inheritance and a set of journals which his son starts reading. It is from these diaries that the detective discovers that the father he'd always loved was somebody he didn't know.

As the murder case unfolds, Falcón's mind unravels. He is beset with inexplicable anxieties and his brief moments of sleep are wracked by vivid dreams, as all the old certainties of his organised life are undermined.

More victims fall under the killer's unflinching blade. But from the multitude of evidence, from the terrible hidden secrets embedded in the victim's lives, Falcón, even with his idiosyncratic methods, cannot make the breakthrough until the final missing section of his father's journals comes to light. And until Falcón himself becomes the killer's next intended victim.

With The Blind Man of Seville , Robert Wilson's unparalleled combination of suspenseful storytelling and for the ambiguities of the human soul confirm his place as one of the best mystery writers in the world today.