Customer Reviews

The Hidden Assassins

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4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Robert Wilson's "The Hidden Assassins" is an intricate novel about the lengths to which extremists will go to achieve their goals. Wilson's recurring hero is Seville-based homicide inspector Javier Falcon, who is called to the scene when a naked corpse is found in a pile of rubbish. The victim had been scalped, his hands had been cut off, and his face was burned with acid to prevent identification.

Falcon is still pining after Consuelo Jimenez, a beautiful woman with whom he had a brief and torrid affair four years earlier. Little does Falcon know that Consuelo is close to an emotional breakdown because she is tormented by demons from her past; she is considering entering therapy with a blind clinical psychologist whom Falcon himself has consulted, Alicia Aguado. Meanwhile, Falcon's ex-wife, Ines, is unhappily married to a philandering and arrogant judge named Esteban Calderon who abuses her.

The main plot centers on a huge explosion that destroys an apartment building and mosque, and damages a nearby preschool. Falcon and his team, along with agents from Spanish intelligence and the antiterrorism squad, work tirelessly to find the perpetrators of this atrocity before they strike again. The public is inclined to believe that the explosion is the work of Islamic extremists, but why would they bomb a mosque? Could the explosion have been accidental? There are many questions to be answered, and it will take superior investigative work to break open this case.

"The Hidden Assassins" is a textured and atmospheric novel in which the author closely examines his characters and their actions, demonstrating that appearances may indeed be deceiving. Falcon discovers the existence of a fanatical Catholic group whose members despise Muslims. Could this right-wing organization have been involved in the bombing? If so, what did they hope to accomplish? Does the disfigured corpse discovered at the beginning of the novel have anything to do with the explosion? Falcon and his colleagues have their hands full interrogating witnesses, tracking down elusive clues, and making sense of a vast and confusing array of facts. More dead bodies pile up before this agonizing case is resolved, and Falcon is not completely at peace with the outcome.

Robert Wilson has written a suspenseful and literate book that examines the breakdown of the fabric of modern society. Spain, where Catholics and Muslims live uneasily side-by-side, is not unique. Resentment and suspicion have infected mixed ethnic and religious communities all over the world. In addition, the author examines his characters' troubled personal lives. There are loving, loyal, and courageous men and women who are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good; however, there are also quite a few individuals who are petty, selfish, cruel, and sadistic. "The Hidden Assassins" refers not just to the terrorists among us, but also to the people we know who kill us a little bit each day with their cutting remarks and vicious betrayals. This intelligent, challenging, and suspenseful novel has a number of thought-provoking and disturbing themes that will resonate with readers for a long time to come.

Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon returns in one of the most baffling and sophisticated cases of his career when a horribly disfigured body is found in a local dump in Seville, the face burned off with acid, hands surgically removed, making recognition virtually impossible: "The unidentifiable corpse was like a neurosis." Although Falcon goes into action with his usual sense of purpose, the investigation is soon overshadowed by an explosion that demolishes a building in the poor section of town, killing the innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a horror all too familiar since the 2005 Madrid bombings. That the bomb originated in a neighborhood mosque only serves to exacerbate the incipient turf wars of the anti-terrorism agencies, the din of their competition a testament to the new world order.

Falcon retains control of the investigation, at least figuratively, Juez Esteban Calderon assigned to the bombing case as well. Falcon has a history with Calderon, married for four years to the inspector's ex-wife, Inez. Given the pressure of public panic and the threat of terrorist activities, the process is retarded by internal entanglements and agency distrust, while the outraged citizens clamor for protection. The charismatic Calderon skillfully steers the volatile public debate, but his influence is short-lived when personal demons and a previously-hidden murderous temperament surface, Falcon's case fraught with internal complications ("Charisma... an intense form of self-belief. Its closest friend can quite quickly become corruption").

Since we first met the serious, honorable Falcon in The Blind Man of Seville, his job has altered with the passing years, the terrain of police work become a hotbed of self-serving opportunism under the vast umbrella of terrorist conspiracy. Not given to easy platitudes or simplistic explanations of good vs. evil, the Spanish are sensitive to the intricate workings of religious zeal, politics and public policy, the delicate links between a passion for change and the slippery slope of strange bedfellows in aid of a cause. Falcon uncovers a morass of moral uncertainty corrupted by hidden agendas. In the end, the hidden assassins are not the individual perpetrators of terrible events, but the constantly shifting landscape of expediency, fundamental splinter groups, Christian, Muslim and related interests activated by tragedy, opportunists rushing in to take advantage of the chaos and further their own political gains.

Suddenly everything is relative, the waste of innocent lives a collateral issue rather than an outrage. All of this goes against the natural grain of Falcon's psyche, the purity of his intent distorted in a tragedy with the Shakespearean flair of a modern man tormented by the convoluted logic of a terror-obsessed world. A catalyst for more intense questioning than the accepted rhetoric of the last few years, Falcon clings to the integrity that fuels his existence, undiminished by violence, a profoundly moral man in an increasingly immoral environment. Luan Gaines/2006.

"The Hidden Assassins" is the 9/11 novel that's not about 9/11. The bomb blast that takes down a building in a Spanish city is an atrocity is on a smaller scale than the World Trade Center attack, but the aftermath covers the same routes that the survivors travel, and reflects the trauma a nation goes through at the hands of terrorists.

The book doesn't begin with the blast, but with the discovery of a man's corpse, sans hands and facial features, in a Seville landfill. The investigating detective, Jefe Javier Falcon, barely gets the investigation rolling when sounds of the explosion roll through the city.

But the book is not a direct recreation of 9/11. The presence of a mosque in the basement of the building raises important questions. Was the blast a bombmaker's error? Or was it revenge? There are several groups in play: intelligence services that may have been investigating the mosque, a political party from the Andalucia region that sees its popularity growing, a major multinational with a mysterious agenda. Anything is possible.

While the explosion doesn't affect everyone, there are those whose lives fly apart as if it had. Much of the tension in "Assassins" comes from watching them try to hold the center. Who will collapse? Falcon's ex-wife, who learns of her husband's affair? The husband whose family was pancaked in the building? Or Falcon's Arab friend who's asked to spy for him?

Wilson's story rarely does what's expected, keeping us off-balance throughout, and implying that life can be as combustible as a hundred pounds of semtex. I gave myself only two weeks to read the book, and I wished, at the end, that I had more. It's that good.

Hands down, Robert Wilson is perhaps the most under rated author of this genre writing today. His books are focused, intense, detailed almost to a fault, and thoroughly atmospheric and engaging. His latest books have been set in Seville, Spain with the central character of Chief Inspector Falcon. Falcon is a dedicated professional that is constantly balancing the demands of the job and the demands of his personal life.

This book draws on the terrorist attacks that have occurred since 9/11/2001, and remember that Spain suffered its own losses with the terrible train bombings in Madrid just a couple of years after the 9/11 attacks. This time we have a terrorist plot unravelling in Seville, and the subsequent investigation will bring down not only the perpetrators - or perhaps only some of them - but also some of the main characters that have been constant in the Seville novels. Bombings, murder, faceless bodies, personal tragedy and political posturing are all some of things that Falcon must navigate through during his investigation - not to mention personal tragedies that will befall him as well. What sets one author apart from another is often not just the story line, but the characters. I often find that the very best books are the ones that you never want to end, because the characters have become important to you, have become "friends" that you do not want to see go away. These are the types of characters that Mr. Wilson develops - characters whose stories you do not want to end - characters you never want to disengage with.

Before the Seville novels, Robert Wilson wrote a series set in Africa that were equally detailed, intense and gripping. Perhaps Mr. Wilson writes books that require you to think and concentrate a bit more that the average crime novel, but the result is a absolutely stunning book that is as good as any other in this genre, one that transports you not only into the action, but into the locale as well. Read one of Mr. Wilson's books and you will find yourself in Seville as well as in the drama of the book itself. I can not recommend an author more highly than I do Robert Wilson, and this book is as good a place to start reading his works as any.

My paperback edition of "The Hidden Assassins" is 642 pages in length. At 350 pages, it might have been a fine thriller. At 300, it might have soared to the status of an 87th Precinct-type police procedural set in Spain (no small praise, I assure you!) But at its current length, "The Hidden Assassins" is a bloated, mostly-failed novel with a really hokey title.

The best part of the book--and the part that should have been salvaged by a competent editor, even as she or he wielded a savage blue pencil on the wannabe, novelistic tripe, deals with the catastrophic explosion that flattens a wing of a working-class apartment building, a building that housed a small, working-class mosque at its base. Far and away the best writing in the book describes the bombing and its immediate consequences. This starts partway through Chapter 5 and ends a couple of pages into Chapter 10, not quite a hundred pages in all. Prior to the bombing, the book executed a stutter step through no less than six potential opening gambits, ranging from the cliched, to the consciously obscure, to the tedious and downright boring. Once it got to the blast, though, Wilson's prose became lean and pointed and the dramatic engine beneath the surface of the book revved up. By Chapter 10, I was convinced that the book was going to be a smart, swift, exciting ride.

It was not to be. On page 158, an ambulance tears off in one direction, carrying a survivor and most of the book's narrative energy with it, while the protagonist of the book, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón saunters off in another direction. It soon becomes plain that the swift, pointed narrative had been a temporary aberration and that the fumbling start(s) marked the author's true concept of the book. Author Wilson, it appeared, had higher aims than being a mere master of thrillers and procedurals. He was a novelist--in his own mind, at least.

As the mere adjunct to a novel, the thriller must suffer. For one thing, the plot, without any fuss at all, suddenly loses its coherence. Here is just one example: Falcón is the head of the police team investigating the biggest single crime committed in Seville during his lifetime. One might, then, reasonably expect that he focus on that crime. But no, both he and his team are curiously indifferent to the crime at hand, focusing instead on an earlier crime that they speculate MIGHT have had something to do with the explosion ... maybe. Falcón, himself, goes haring off to North Africa on a day trip, at the bidding of shadowy intelligence agencies because he is THE ONLY MAN WHO CAN DO THE VITAL JOB--trumped up nonsense that was old hat in Kipling's time.

In fact, the sole reason for that ridiculous diversion is to allow the novelist-author to introduce what he clearly regards as an intelligent and enlightened man with whom Falcón can hold a Philosophical Discussion about the BIG issues of East and West and of an Age of Terrorism. Shucks, everybody knows that novels are about the big stuff, not trifles like apartment buildings collapsing and mosques being crushed beneath them, aren't they?

The said Philosophical Discussion, alas, is a complete flop, resembling nothing so much as the beery conversations in which callow undergraduates take on the problems of the world and devise the clear and simple solutions their elders had inexplicably failed to see:

"But then you rage against the lack of progress and the inability to change in the Arab world."

"I rage against poverty, the lack of work for a young and growing population, the humiliation of a people by--"

"But if you give a young guy work, he'll make money and go out and buy a mobile phone, an iPod and a car," said Falcón.

"He will, once he had made sure that his family is taken care of," said Diouri. "And that is fine as long as the materialism doesn't become his new God. A lot of Americans are profoundly religious whilst being driven by materialism. They believe it goes hand in hand. They are wealthy because they are the chosen people."

"Well, that's confused everything," said Falcón. [Page 286]

Well, I say that particular conversation didn't count for very much, even when it took place between Thoreau and Emerson back at Harvard College, nor when I joined in at my own university, and no more, a couple of centuries hence, when it pops up at the University of Mars.

This is a book in which every female character is abused in one way or another so as to be less than a whole and competent human being. This is a book in which two characters are each given a major introduction and build-up only to serve no real function. This is a book in which a background character is all but conjured out of thin air and onto center stage in order to confirm what has been no more than a set of improbable speculations and, having done so, vanishes just as quickly. This is a book in which all the important characters are close friends or, failing that, at least former spouses. This is a book that aims high but falls into mere soap opera. This is a book in which the author zooms right past the natural end in pursuit of unrewarding anticlimax.

In short, this is a book that coulda been a contender, but now it's just a mug.

Three stars--for what might have been, rather than what is.

This is Robert Wilson's third Falcon mystery and it certainly meets or beats the standard set by its predecessers. "Hidden Assassins" is elaborately and cleverly plotted, using recent terrorist activities in Spain, Britain and Morocco as underpinning for a rather amazing story of criss-crossing espionage, counter-espionage and political skullduggery that takes place in Chief Inspector Javier Falcon's Seville. As usual, the author gives the city and its institutions a big role in the story's context. Secondary plots involving Falcon's ex-wife and his one-time girlfriend are sometimes a little over the top, but ultimately story enriching. One of these secondary mysteries is left unresolved, presumably grist for the next novel. This is a first-rate thriller with an exotic locale and a variety of very well-conceived and very human characters. Highly recommended.

Robert Wilson continues the saga of Inspector Jefe Falcon with another moody, clever and surprising novel set in modern day Seville, Spain. Wilson writes with a fine intelligent hand and puts you in the streets of Seville- you can feel the summer heat beating off the pavement.
Wilson sets his dark novels in Spain,Portugal or Africa. He knows these places and the people who live there. His books are gems and his writing just seems to get better with each novel.

Robert Wilson is one of the most gifted novelists writing in this genre, so expectations are stratospheric for each new title. The Hidden Assassins is one of his very best -- literate, surprising, thrilling, with rich characters.

Dead bodies, bombs, subterfuge and international intrigue make up this intricately written procedural.

Oh yes, there's a love interest as well.

Inspector Jefe Javier Falcon begins his immersion into conflict and potential catastrophe when he investigates the death surrounding a mutilated, faceless corpse. As he opens that investigation, a powerful explosion sets the city of Seville on edge and pressure mounts for explanations and resolution. Are religious fanatics involved--there was a mosque located in the basement of the targeted building--and are there other targets? And when Falcon finds a connection between the unidentified, disfigured corpse and the bombing, the clock starts ticking down to disaster.

Details slowed the pace of the story from time to time, but as they say, "The devil is in the details." However, in addition to those scenes where I was anxious to get on with the story, Wilson also writes some scenes that are moving and powerful in their introspection. I was more than happy to slow up and read those with measured deliberation.

Armchair Interviews says: If you enjoy a large cast of characters, thoroughly researched and real-time plots, you will enjoy The Hidden Assassins.

The Hidden Assassins takes the Javier Falcon quartet of novels onto a whole new energy level. Themes hinted at in the second novel, The Vanished Hands, burst into full flower in THA. THA isn't just a great police procedural; it is a great novel.

I like many things about Wilson's writing. He develops great characters and makes the reader care about them, something not always true of this genre. He has a fantastic sense of place which he conveys no matter where the action takes his novels. And he has a genius for tight, complex plotting, similar to Robert Littell, another genre master.

Readers of other Wilson works, especially A Small Death in Lisbon, know that he has a talent for hiding key elements of the plot in plain sight to ironic effect. THA brims over with this technique and really sets the table for the final book, Ignorance of Blood.

The War on Terror is the front piece of the plot, but there are many other important plot elements going on here as well. In the hands of almost any other writer, this many plot developments would lead to a confusing mess. Wilson takes the reader through all of it smartly. Upon finishing the book, I tried to think of anything he could have pulled back out and not hurt the overall effort. I couldn't think of it.

If you're new to Wilson, make sure to read this quartet in order of publishing, starting with The Blind Man of Seville. If you've finished this quartet, then by all means read his excellent A Small Death in Lisbon.