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Los Minutos Negros (2006)

by Martin Solares(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

9685963312 (ISBN13: 9789685963312)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Random House Mondadori

review 1: I eventually enjoyed immersing myself in the police drama, the landscape, and the dark secrets of the coastal Mexican city of Paracuan. However, the English translation seemed very uneven and created a negative first impression. I was immediately put off by what seemed to be amateurish and/or unimaginative translation in the first few chapters. The characters and the premise of the story were compelling enough to keep me going, and I was pleased to find as I read into "Book Two" (the historical, stage-setting part of the story) that the quality of the writing improved greatly--artful and absorbing. "Book Three" found the narrative returning to the same cheap, silly, and confusing language that plagued "Book One." There are also some throw-away plot diversions into UFO... mores and occult phenomena here (which I'm assuming were intended to give the story a dream-like depth), but, story-telling inconsistencies aside, navigating Paracuan's streets and mysteries with Detectives Cabrera and Rangel was an intriguing and worthwhile experience. The tropical, Latin American geography definitely amplified my interest in this story.
review 2: This book received some very prestigious awards, and I feel bad about giving up on it. I just couldn't get into it. Perhaps the translation isn't as good as it should be. Maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind for it. I don't know. There's a police investigation into the death of a journalist who was looking into an earlier investigation into the serial murders of young girls. There's police corruption. The detective investigating the journalist's murder is threatened and involved in an accident, which sends us back in time to the original investigation into the child killings. I'm not saying don't read it. I might get back to it myself, at some point. Just not now. less

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