Red April

Description

The priest adjusted a cross hanging on the wall. It was a black cross without the image of Christ. Just a black cross on a grey surface. The prosecutor did not want to think about the cross burned into the forehead of the corpse... Eccentric Felix Chacaltana Saldivar is a hapless, by-the-book prosecutor living in a small town, six hundred kilometers from Lima. Until now he has lived a life in which nothing exceptionally good or bad has ever happened to him. But when a charred and mutilated body, discovered during Carnival, signals the return of a serial murderer, Saldivar is inexplicably put in charge of the enquiry. As he investigates he must confront what happens to a man, and to a society, when death becomes the only certainty.

Santiago Roncagliolo has been a screenwriter, investigative journalist and political adviser. He was born in Lima, Peru, and currently lives in Barcelona. Edith Grossman is the award-winning translator of such masterworks as Cervantes's Don Quixote and Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.

A tour de force * Times Literary Supplement * Riveting... Red April is rooted in Peru's past and present, but resonates far beyond * Guardian * The terrible story of a society without hope * Independent * Violence stalks the pages... A dark and almost unhinged display * Irish Times *