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    A Small Death in Lisbon
    Unavailable
    A Small Death in Lisbon
    Unavailable
    A Small Death in Lisbon
    Ebook626 pages9 hours

    A Small Death in Lisbon

    By Robert Wilson

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    This stunning, atmospheric thriller set in war-torn Europe won the CWA Gold Dagger and has now been reissued with the Javier Falcon series.

    A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals.

    Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.
    1941. Klaus Felsen, SS, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the bleak mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg.

    Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Ze Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl with a disturbing sexual past. As Ze digs deeper he overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Ze must face the most chilling opposition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 24, 2010
    ISBN9780007378142
    Unavailable
    A Small Death in Lisbon
    Author

    Robert Wilson

    Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising and trading in Africa. He has travelled in Asia and Africa and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He is married and writes from an isolated farmhouse in Portugal.

    Read more from Robert Wilson

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    Reviews for A Small Death in Lisbon

    4/5

    275 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 4/5
      This book was recommended to me as a high-quality thriller... something that's a bit hard to find, sometimes.
      When it came in the mail, I have to say, my first thought was, "why does it have to have swastikas all over it?" OK, fine, Nazis, villains, but you still don't always want to be carrying swastikas around with you on the subway... It put me off from reading it for a while.

      But - I got around to it.
      It's a very well-written book. I haven't visited Portugal, but I was convinced that the author effectively captured the setting and culture of Lisbon.

      However, the plotting and pacing were sometimes... off. There are two stories here - one in the 1940's, about a German businessman who is recruited into the SS and set to acquiring stocks of the rare mineral wolfram (tungsten) from Portugal. The other is set in the 1990s, with a police investigator looking into the murder of a young girl whose body is found on the beach.

      There is absolutely no connection between the two alternating narratives until page 289. That's kind of a lot of pages. The 1940s narrative develops very slowly, and, this isn't really a spoiler, but a lot of the details from that narrative NEVER become relevant to the events of the 1990s.

      After this very slow buildup, the end is a crazy rush! Car chases! Murders! Betrayals! Plot twists galore! All jammed into the last 50 pages or so! It's fun and exciting, but it doesn't really fit with the flow of the rest of the book.

      Also, this is not really a criticism, but a reader should know that getting into this book is signing up for spending a lot of time with some really despicable people. I mean, we are talking SS officers here, and there are war atrocities, sexually perverse murders, etc. At times I was longing for some decent human beings to show their faces...

      One more note - I kind of objected to the assumption that healthy, happy teenagers would NEVER get involved in a sexual threesome... ;-)

      Oh, and just ONE more note... to point out the importance of proofreading. One of the chapter headers has a typo. It says "1995" instead of "1955." Forty years makes a big difference, in this book! That was very confusing, until I figured it out...

      All this said, overall, I did think the book was quite well done, and well-researched, especially for the murder-mystery genre. I would read more from this author.
    • 4/5
      I was looking for a police procedural set in Portugal to read on the plane from LA to Lisbon and I found this on a BBC list of Mysteries set around the world. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but the narrative was split about 70/30 between Nazi's in WWII and late 1990's Lisbon. I enjoyed the characters latter setting a lot more. As with a book like Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, I felt like I learned a lot about the history of the country though WWII but that part of the story could have been told a little more compactly.

      The cover is very conspicuous.
    • 4/5
      The story begins in the 1990's in Portugal when the body of a teenaged girl is found on a beach brutally murdered. Inspector Ze Coelho and his colleague are first on the scene and begin the investigation by tracking the final days of Catalina's life where they discover her innocence was destroyed by sex, drugs and emotional abuse.The story then backtracks to 1941 when Klaus Felsen is forced out of his Berlin factory and into the ranks of the SS. He is sent to Lisbon where his mandate is to procure at any cost wolfram an essential metal needed by the 3rd Reich. Lisbon is a hotbed of activity and the base of operation where he meets a man who plunges him into a nightmarish world of brutality...By masterfully moving back and forth from one era to another, connections and secrets are slowly unravelled to the present day Portugal. In doing so, Coelho skilfully links the past to the murder of Caterina...This is a remarkable and powerful fiction novel based on historical facts, beautifully structured with inspiring characters and a gripping tale full of machination. The complicated murder plot involves the life of many suspects converging on the victim. The Felsen story takes all kinds of twists and turns giving us an insight into how the Nazi paid using "Nazi Gold" and the Salazar controlled central bank.Both Catalina and Klaus stories are interesting on their own leading readers to wonder how they tie in. Wilson drops clues along the way revealing an incredibly complex ending that is as clever as it is intricate. This novel has a lot of descriptive sex and violence which may not appeal to all readers. In whole this book was fascinating and one of the best I have read in a long time, I will definitely be checking other novels written by this author.
    • 4/5
      There are two stories in A small death in Lisbon: the first is around the murder of a young girl in 1990's; the second is about Klaus Felsen sent in 1941 in Portugal for procuring the wolfram (a metal needed by the 3rd Reich). Wilson moves back and forth from one to another story, slowly linking the past and present Portugal. The plot is complicated, the historical settings are well researched and the characters are interesting, even if not very likeable; the rhythm, however, is slow, there are some scenes of sex and violence and an assumption that isn't scientifically correct.
    • 4/5
      Wilson alternates two stories; one involves a contemporary (1998) Lisbon policeman searching for the murderer of a teenage girl; the second describes the gradual growth of wealth and power of a German businessman turned SS officer as he uses cunning and murder to during WWII to provide a vital mineral from Portugal to the German war machine. Both stories are interesting, and the reader keeps trying to figure out how they will connect. The connection is fully revealed only at the very end. For me, the most interesting aspect of the book is the description of the links between the Nazis and the "neutral" Salazar, and the SS connection to Brazil.
    • 4/5
      "A Small Death in Lisbon" has all of my favorite elements -- interesting and believeable characters, a complex mystery plot, a fascinating setting, and two narratives, one in the past, World War II, and one in the present. One reviewer said that the characters were too unlikeable, but I completely disagree. On the first page, the reader meets the murder victim from the 1998 storyline, who turns out to be a promiscuous 15-year-old Portuguese girl named Caterina. As the mother of a teenage daughter, Caterina broke my heart. She lived in a wealthy but twisted household, the victim of psychological abuse and then murder. I immediately cared about her and wanted to know her story. The detective who pursues her killer, Ze Coelho, has a sad recent past and also a teenage daughter. The focus of the historical plot is Klaus Felsen, a Berlin factory-owner turned SS officer, sent to neutral Portugal to acquire wolfram for the Nazi war machine. Despite his often-despicable actions, I found him to be strangely sympathetic. The novel demonstrates how brutal treatment spawns brutality. There are truly evil characters in the book as well, but many of them receive their just desserts. Usually in books that alternate narratives, I find myself intersted in one plotline more than the other. Some reviewers enjoyed the historical plot more, but I found them both to be compelling. Only once or twice was I tempted to skip ahead to continue following one plot or the other. I could not wait to learn how the two narratives would converge. Wilson placed tantalizing clues along the way. As Wilson brought the two narrative threads together, I could hardly put the book down! Many reviewers have also commented upon the setting. I visited Portugal many years ago and this book made me want to go back. The author lives in Portugal and he vividly depicts the landscape and the culture.
    • 3/5
      Let me start by saying I didn’t really enjoy this book all that much. It tells two parallel stories, which come together by the end, as you know they must. One story is about police inspector Coelho investigating the murder of a teenage girl in modern day Lisbon (the book is written/set in the early 1990’s), the other about smuggling of commodities and gold between Portugal and Germany during World War II. Each is reasonably interesting, but I found all the characters in the WWII story so unpleasant, and their behavior so disturbing and distasteful, that I couldn’t enjoy these chapters at all. Also, both stories have quite a lot of graphic, violent sex, involving men behaving very badly towards women, as well as some graphic violence generally, involving men behaving very badly towards men. These were relevant to the story, but still somewhat off-putting. I am not at all a prude about sex in books, but here it felt unnecessary a lot of the time, as well as not brilliantly written.This is the first book I have read by Robert Wilson, but I know he is highly rated by many here on LT, so the jury is very much out. I have [The Blind Man of Seville] on my shelf, which is highly regarded, so I will probably read that one before making a final decision on Wilson’s place on my long term TBR list.
    • 4/5
      A very complex knot of a work that time travels from SS atrocities during the war to current day Portugal. A policeman is assigned to investigate the murder of a promiscuous teen girl, and the book cuts back and forth between history and contemporary events. It's a tad overcooked, and too smart for it's own sake, which diminishes the power of its revelations.
    • 4/5
      This book is so entrancing that I don't really mind that the ending is rushed and disheveled. For me, that's a lot to forgive.
    • 3/5
      Good mystery. Sort of difficult to follow time changes in a few places, since it takes place in the same locations 50-odd years apart. You keep wondering how everything will tie together in the end, but it does.
    • 5/5
      “He was part of the cycle. We were all part of the damaging cycle.” A line spoken by Inspector Coelho and filled with such veracity and genuineness, that you are compelled to see this novel through to the final and surprising ending. Robert Wilson's "A Small Death in Lisbon," is filled with action, suspense and more drama than you can shake an escudo at. Set in Portugal before, during, after and well-after certain dynamic events of World War II, Mr. Wilson weaves an intricate web of lies compounded by deceit and reinforced with treachery and topped off with murder. And although Mr. Wilson can be wordy, he tells a great tale.
    • 5/5
      For much of the book A Small Death in Lisbon is like reading two novels. One book follows the investigation by Inspector Ze Coehlo into the 1990's murder and possible sexual assault of a 16-year old daughter of a powerful Portuguese lawyer. The other one is the tale of German businessman and SS supporter Klaus Felsen who is 'persuaded' to move to Portugal and obtain wolfram (tungsten) for the Nazi war effort. Great fortunes are amassed and powerful connections established. Wilson sets his tale in 20th century European history. He covers aspects of WW II that were new to this reader and from a German and Portuguese perspective - also unusual - and the reign of the conservative dictator Salazar and the revolution of 1974. Portugal's development as a modern society provides the background for much of the story. Both those stories are interesting in their own right, but meander along and the reader is left to wonder how the two stories could possibly come together. Finally about midway into the book the author drops a clue. Things begin to pick up. I partially agree with another reviewer (who, unlike me, did not like the book): there is a lot of drinking, smoking, sex, and violence. The sex and violence passages are descriptive without quite being gratuitously graphic, in my opinion, but others will disagree. To each his own, but some readers may want to be aware of these elements. I probably would have given the book four stars, but in the last 100 pages or so the twin stories crash together as the tale reaches an exciting and satisfying resolution. As I closed the book cover, I actually said 'wow, what a finish'.
    • 4/5
      Slow for the first three quarters, the sustaining interest is the development of the Felsen character who is then incarcerated. Action and story picks up in the later quarter of the book.