Brazil Nuts

My Kirkus Reviews column this week is a critique of Perfect Hatred, Leighton Gage’s sixth Brazil-set mystery thriller.

Don’t be turned off by the book’s title, which is taken from the Bible’s Psalm 139:22 (“I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies”); this isn’t a heavily blood-soaked tale that exists principally to shock readers. Instead, it’s a carefully constructed yarn that finds Chief Inspector Mario Silva and his subordinates on Brazil’s Federal Police Force tackling two crimes simultaneously: a suicide bombing in the country’s largest city, São Paulo, and the assassination of a fast-rising, anti-corruption candidate for governor in the state of Paraná. “And as if Mario Silva didn’t have enough problems already,” I write in the piece, “his all-too-familiar nemesis, deep-pocketed landowner Orlando Muniz--now awaiting trial for having killed a priest--is arranging the clandestine murders not only of the public prosecutor in his case, Zanon Parma, but Silva as well.”

You can enjoy reading the whole column here.