The promise of a genuine Cervantes manuscript is the ravishing lure in this adroitly constructed and literate mystery tale. A nine-year old child and her nanny are destroyed in a terrorist (?) bomb blast in the Seville airport. A brutal fisherman disappears at sea in a boat his fishing alone could not buy. His mutterings about an "Operation Cervantes" baffle his mistress (a novelist he cannot understand much less control). Rumors of the availability of the first six chapters of Don Quixote in Cervantes's hand ruffle the ...
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The promise of a genuine Cervantes manuscript is the ravishing lure in this adroitly constructed and literate mystery tale. A nine-year old child and her nanny are destroyed in a terrorist (?) bomb blast in the Seville airport. A brutal fisherman disappears at sea in a boat his fishing alone could not buy. His mutterings about an "Operation Cervantes" baffle his mistress (a novelist he cannot understand much less control). Rumors of the availability of the first six chapters of Don Quixote in Cervantes's hand ruffle the greedy rare book market. A discovery like this is something scholars know to be improbable, but a convincing scrap authenticated as the real thing keeps the lure moving in lively and discreet circulation. The CIA in Washington has embraced, if that is possible for the impossibly haughty aristocrat involved, a reactionary count who lunches regularly with the king. The dead child's father, an American, ex-CIA, and happily married into an old Spanish banking family disappears. A professor of Spanish history in the American Northwest and an expert CIA hit man is sent to Madrid. Corpses multiply. The airport bombing is the murderous sign of a complex but always well-controlled puzzle that burrows deeply into modern Spanish society, politics, manners and sensibility. While the scene is fundamentally Spanish, there are crucial New York, London, Oxford and French episodes. The Cabal is morally exacting, sexually interesting, and violent where necessary. Clever and emotionally costly its milieu is closer to the espionage novel than to the traditional puzzle mystery. Its solution is absolutely convincing and as refreshing as a glass of the driest Spanish sherry.
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