Southwesterly Wind - Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza; Translated by Benjamin Moser

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Southwesterly Wind

An Inspector Espinosa Mystery

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza; Translated by Benjamin Moser

Picador, January 2005
ISBN: 978-0-312-42454-1, ISBN10: 0-312-42454-X,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 256 pages,
Trade Paperback, $16.00

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories Latin American & Caribbean Studies Latin American & Caribbean Studies - All Titles Literature World: Latin America & Caribbean

Chief of the Copacabana precinct, Espinosa is more than happy to interrupt his paperwork when a terrified young man arrives at the station with a bizarre story. A psychic has predicted that he would commit a murder, or so it seems, and the prediction has now become fact in the young man's mind. As the weather changes and the southwesterly wind—always a sign of dramatic change—starts up, what at first seems like paranoia becomes brutal reality. Two violent murders occur, and their only link is the lonely man who had sought out Espinosa a few days earlier for help.

In Southwesterly Wind, the third in this atmospheric and erotic series featuring the inimitable Inspector Espinosa, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza once again "breathes fresh air into the crime novel genre" (Los Angeles Times).

Praise

"One of the pleasures of reading Garcia-Roza derives from watching how he thwarts our narrative experiences. Throughout Southwesterly Wind, he shuffles and reshuffles a limited deck of secondary characters to assemble startling patterns. [A] wry and poetic voice."—Maureen Corrigan, Newsday

"A fortune-teller predicts that Gabriel, a thirtyish administrator, will commit murder before his next birthday. As the year progresses, Gabriel slowly unravels under the burden of the prediction, until he is driven to the office of Inspector Espinosa, where he confesses to the potential for crime. This third installment in the series (following December Heat) takes Espinosa into repressive, middle-class Rio de Janeiro, peopled with conservative parents and their secretive adult children. While billed as 'An Inspector Espinosa Mystery,' this is hardly a traditional police procedural but more an investigation into the nature of crime and its damaging effects on all that it touches. Fans of the existential Espinosa will delight in the interweaving of his personal life with the investigation. Garcia-Roza, fast becoming known as the master of Rio noir, delivers a taut novel in tight prose, well translated by Moser. For all mystery collections."—Library Journal

"The weather, perhaps a stand-in for fate, has a hand in the tentative outcome of Southwesterly Wind, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's third psychologically acute crime novel (after 2003's December Heat), translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author(s)

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a bestselling novelist who lives in Rio de Janeiro. Southwesterly Wind is the third installment in the Inspector Espinosa Mystery series. The Silence of the Rain and December Heat are the first and second, respectively.

Visit Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Website

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Excerpt

1
At four in the afternoon, the little neighborhood restaurant was empty. The only waiter, toward the back, divided his attention between a pile of plates in front of him and the television perched in the corner of the room. Eyes glued to the screen, he took a plate, sprayed some alcohol on it, wiped it off, and stacked it on another pile next to the first one. He did it unhurriedly, at the pace of the TV movie.

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