A Window in Copacabana: Summary and book reviews of A Window in Copacabana by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, plus links to an excerpt from A Window in Copacabana and a biography of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza.
A Window in Copacabana Inspector Espinosa Series
by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza
Hardcover: Jan 2005,
243 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2006,
272 pages.
A ruthless group of corrupt cops is playing a lethal game of cat and mouse in the latest installment in the "seductive" (New York Times Book Review) Brazilian crime series.
Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Three policemen have been killed over the course of a few days. They were mediocre cops, and their deaths have a lot in common: they were eliminated by a cold-blooded assassin, who leaves no trace and likes to fire at point-blank range.
Immediately the police world is thrown into turmoil. Who would risk running around the city killing cops, even unpopular ones? People involved in drug trafficking? Other policemen? Espinosa, chief of the 12th Precinct, doesn't have much to go on. And when the body of a woman connected to one of the dead cops is found on the sidewalk below her apartment window, things get even more complicated, as a reputed "witness" -- the wife of a high-ranking government official -- becomes obsessed with the case, and with Espinosa.
Nothing is quite as it first appears as Espinosa 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. A Window in Copacabana is the best novel yet in what Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times Book Review calls a "beguiling series."
If you like your mysteries to be all blood and guts and tidy endings, move on. On the other hand, 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! (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The Washington Post - Paul Skenazy
This is entertainment of a high order, sly and smart, giving away nothing until the final pages.
Publishers Weekly
Fans of sophisticated crime fiction with an exotic locale are in for a treat.
Booklist - Brad Hooper
Starred Review. Sunny Rio proves as noirish a setting as sunny Los Angeles does for American mystery writers, and Garcia-Roza exploits the Brazilian city's seemliness and steaminess to perfection in tough but sensuous language.
Book Page
A Window in Copacabana is tropical noir at its best, lush with exotic backdrop and sophisticated in dialogue and plot.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza used to be a Professor of Philosophy at Rio
University in Brazil until, about eight years ago, he decided to try
something new and turned to writing mysteries. He says that he was
attracted to writing mysteries because 'they are the direct descendants of
mythological thought (and ancient Greek poetry), and bring to the center of
the narrative the most intense and fundamental questions of the human being:
death and sexuality. These are also the main concerns of psychoanalysis, one
of the two areas of my academic research.'
He has always lived in
Copacabana
(a Rio neighborhood, on the coast, to the East of the city).
The fifth volume in the series, Pursuit, was published in the USA a
few days ago.
Bibliography: The Silence of the Rain (2002) December Heat (2003) Southwesterly Wind (2004) A Window in Copacabana ('05) Pursuit (Jan...
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