Tuesday, February 19, 2013

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous-9 said...

Love the quote, reference and title. Thanks, Jeff.

Naomi Johnson said...

I'm reading PERFECT HATRED now, and as with all of the books in this series, I'm enjoying it immensely. May author Gage never take a notion to kill off Silva's sidekick, Arnaldo Nunes, who provides so much of the welcome humor.