Title: More a snoozer than a swashbuckler
Product review: This was a difficult book to get excited about. While I think Perez-Reverte sets the scene of religious/political 17th century Madrid quite nicely and does a good job weaving in historical and fictional threads, the other elements of the book are so unremarkable that the novel isn't able to hold itself together. The characters and plot are stock choices, either the translation or the writing itself is clunky and stumbling, and the narrator is interfering and inconsistant. I understand this is the first in a five book series, which explains away some of the dangling incompleteness (nothing at all happens with two of the "nemesis" characters), but I think a finer writer (or editor, perhaps?) could have shaped this novel into a more suitable stand alone volume.
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