Matthew Carr has written another historical thriller that is as action-packed as it is thought-provoking! Centered, as with his debut novel The Devils Of Cardona, on his beloved Spain, Black Sun Rising examines the events leading up to and around the riots of the Tragic Week of 1909, deftly weaving a fictional murder mystery involving…
The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr is a gripping historical thriller set in sixteenth-century Spain. What a timely, topical book. Ostensibly a medieval murder mystery, The Devils of Cardona draws strong parallels with a world currently caught up in theological hysteria, warning both of the perils of forgetting the beauty and kindnesses of religion…
Vagabond by Gerald Seymour follows MI5 officer Winnie Monks on a journey to avenge the death of an agent on her team that takes her all the way to Costa del Sol (Available January 5, 2016). MI5 officer Winnie Monks has never forgotten – or forgiven – the death of a young agent on her…
Some of the most lasting works of art are those than can be appreciated on a variety of levels. Such is the case with Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive. A masterpiece of Spanish cinema, the movie is set in 1940, a year after the Spanish Civil War ended with the authoritarian,…
Ernest Hemingway is one of the biggest names of 20th century literature. He won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and his star seems in no danger of burning out even with tastes shifting away from the controversial sport of his beloved bull fighting and his outdated machismo. Though he didn’t write…
“What is a ghost?” It’s the question at the heart of Guillermo del Toro’s near-perfect The Devil’s Backbone, the pin that holds together the interwoven threads of his layered story. Is it a literal ghost: a restless spirit that persists in stalking the halls at night? Or perhaps the looming specter of war, in a…
The Long Shadow by Liza Marklund, translated from Swedish by Neil Smith, is the eighth featuring Stockholm reporter Annika Bengzton, who'll jet to Spain's glitzy Costa del Sol to investigate the murder of an entire family (available April 15, 2014). Annika Bengzton is probably annoyed with you. Oh, you two haven’t met? That’s okay. The…
I would love to do an experiment and have a person begin The Family of Pascual Duarte knowing just the title. There would be no cover photo, and the author's name would be blacked out. The reader would have none of the usual markers on which to base an expectation of what kind of book…
No doomed wise guy, the man folded inside this luggage was a criminal who pretzeled himself in and out again and again. (While researching the unfortunate story of a young MI6 codebreaker, we stumbled across this less-lethal, though reminiscent tale.) From the site Robbed in Barcelona, we marvel at the clever immigrant contortionist who willingly…
To grass, in British underworld parlance, means to inform on others to the police. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it derives from the word “grasshopper,” Cockney rhyming slang for copper. The term has been around in Britain awhile, since the 1930's. In the 1970's, British journalists invented a new word, “supergrass,” to label an…
