BookBrowse Reviews A Window in Copacabana by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

'Tropical noir at its best'. Mystery

From the book jacket: Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Three policemen have been killed over the course of a few days. Immediately the police world is thrown into turmoil. Who would risk running around the city killing cops, even unpopular ones?  Espinosa, chief of the 12th Precinct, doesn't have much to go on..... and nothing is quite as it first appears as he finds himself in his old haunts of Leme and Copacabana, and in the all-too-familiar murky terrain of corruption, secret lives, greed, and fear. 

Comment: This is the fourth book in the Inspector Espinosa series set in the sultry streets of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  In the author's own words, 'Espinosa is an ordinary man. He is not a hero, he is not always fighting against dangerous criminals, he doesn't get all the beautiful blondes and brunettes that come cross his path. He is a public employee, a middle-aged person, a solitary man. He could be our neighbor. But at the same time, he has a critical mind and a romantic heart, he feels eccentric among his professional peers and out of place in the world. He is not so ordinary, in fact.'

If you like your mysteries to be all blood and guts and tidy endings, move on, but if you're interested in a writer of thoughtful noir crime fiction who includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in his list of favorite authors, and cites Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as his favorite novel, stop right here!

"Garcia-Roza exploits the Brazilian city's seemliness and steaminess to perfection in tough but sensuous language." -- Booklist (starred review).

"Garcia-Roza, who writes like nobody else in the world, has produced altogether the most ebullient and delightful tale of serial homicide you'll read this year."-- Kirkus.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2005, and has been updated for the February 2006 edition. Click here to go to this issue.