The greatest thrillers and mysteries are compelling novels that have a mystery at their core. And so it is with Robert Wilson's The Vanished Hands, a beautifully crafted work that, while it stands independently, builds upon Wilson's prior work, The Blind Man of Seville. Wilson's work is just a gem for the genre; it has solid writing, believable characters, and a difficult, but ultimately believable plot. It is a sophisticated and interesting thriller.
When a wealthy businessman and his wife are found dead in their home in a upscale neighborhood of Seville, Wilson's hero, Inspector Javier Falcon, is at first called upon to determine whether their deaths are a murder/suicide or a double murder. But as the investigation commences, bodies keep piling up: a famous, but washed-up actor takes his own life; a Russian prostitute disappears after a brief interrogation by the police and then turns up murdered, a high-ranking police official commits suicide. Falcon believes all these deaths are linked, and are not accidental, but he can't quite connect the dots.
There's a reason why, of course, which is that the plot is intricate and sometimes difficult to follow. But that's one of the reasons why I like Wilson's works; like the real world, they aren't always tidy and linear. And the complexity of the plot and action shouldn't deter readers; Wilson's stop-and-go quality heightens the tension and the reader's interest. If cops could just connect the dots in a simple straight line, there'd be less unsolved crime, and these kinds of novels would be infinitely less satisfying.
Wilson's strength in drawing characters is another reason to admire his work and read his books. Like many heroes of thrillers, Inspector Falcon has a painful past, and in The Vanished Hands Falcon continues his personal quest of moving on from his troubled relationship with his ex-wife, who is now dating, and soon to marry, one of his superiors. As he moves through his investigation, Falcon is constantly assessing that relationship, whose failure is constantly on display to him, given the small town nature of the police department and Seville. Falcon's candid admissions of his past failures with women and his tentativeness in reaching out for a new chance at love give real depth to his character. Even the minor characters are well-drawn: Maddy Krugman, the voluptuous ex-pat American who may not be candid about her past, and Juez Calderon, Falcon's superior and the fiancé of his ex-wife. For readers who have read other Wilson works, Falcon is an interesting extension on Bruce Medway, the hero of Wilson's novels set in Africa, who also has difficulties with women. But the maturing Wilson is now able to write greater depth into Falcon than Medway ever exhibited.
Wilson's writing is also a pleasure; he has a true gift for physical description. By way of illustration, the action in The Vanished Hands takes place in Seville in the summer, when the weather is beastly hot, and Wilson never lets you forget how the physical surroundings affect the characters and their behavior. Wilson's description of heat shimmering from roadways, and the stifled air of spaces devoid of air conditioning is brilliant.
Finally, Wilson does not shy away from interesting ideas: along the way, the characters in The Vanished Hands confront and consider the lasting emotional harms of pedophilia, the nature of parent-child relationships, the pervasive and apparently ineradicable influence of the Russian mafia in 21st century Europe, and America's unwillingness to come clean about its role in Chile in the 1970s. Most novels, let alone most thrillers, don't cover such wide ground. Yet, one of the satisfying things about The Vanished Hands is that these topics don't feel forced into the novel; they are natural outgrowths of the story line.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2011
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Top reviews from other countries
George Knox
An Excellent Sequel to 'The Blind Man of Seville'.
Reviewed in Canada on March 22, 2015
Sra Shorty
Gets better and better
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 22, 2015Richard Grant
an intelligent detective story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2012