Polar qui pourrait être cryptique et obscur et qui reste très lisible. Évocation saisissante de la dictature finissante. ( )

Dark dealings and corruption on every level inform this work. It's mystery light, but it reveals so much about societal dysfunction in Argentina in the 1970s ( )

Novela policiaca con el marco histórico de la dictadura y violencia política que vivió argentina en los años 1970. ( )

This story is intense, dark and frightening. Mallo brings terror to the reader as he describes life in an unlivable place. Most people don't have to live with the sense they might be murdered by nightfall regardless of how innocent of wrong doings they are, unless of course they lived in Argentina in the seventies.

This is one story I was glad to finish and get back to my own world of relative safety. ( )

In 1976 Argentina’s Dirty War had begun and its environment of state-sponsored illegal arrests, torture, killing and forced disappearances provides a brutal backdrop for what would otherwise be a simple tale of a policeman investigating a murder. Superintendent Lascano is asked to follow up on a report of two bodies being found but when he arrives at the site there are three bodies. Two are of young people who were clearly killed by the Junta’s death squads and their deaths will not be investigated further but the third body is an older man’s which appears to have nothing to do with the others. It is this death that Lascano decides to investigate and he learns it is the body of an Auschwitz survivor who is now an almost universally loathed money-lender.

I have ranted at length about the enormous (seemingly unedited) tomes that are produced in such numbers these days so it is worth noting that I did a little happy dance when I opened this book on my eReader and found it to be 192 pages short. If anyone needs evidence that an engaging, thoughtful story can be told in less than a house brick sized lump they need look no further than the rather haunting Needle in a Haystack. Told from the perspective of several different characters and not in chronological order, the story comes together as a kind of literary jigsaw puzzle with some pieces being found early and having to lie on the table for a while, awaiting their connecting pieces to appear before the full picture could become clear. The book’s snappy length enabled this to be a very successful storytelling mechanism.

There are very memorable characters here, both good and evil. Lascano is a widower who has struggled to come to terms with his wife’s death and the scenes describing his home, from which nothing of hers has been removed, are sad but very credible. His determination to his job, in the face of widespread corruption and overt threats is also credibly portrayed. Some of the most memorable characters have only fleeting appearances, like the General’s wife who thinks the baby she has adopted hates her, but they are all beautifully drawn.

I must admit I found the long blocks of italicised text which eschewed quotation marks and other punctuation a little off-putting as they slowed down my reading pace and I’m still not sure what the format was meant to add to the story. Also the sex scene which spoke of Lascano’s ‘sex being reborn and wanting to fly’ just made me laugh and the schmaltzy tone of the whole scene seemed out of place with the rest of the book. Overall though these are minor quibbles about an excellent book which is both a sound mystery and an unsentimental depiction of what must have been a horrifying time to live through. ( )