Argentina Hotels Travel - Murder in the Central Committee (Five Star Fiction)

"Montalbán writes with authority and compassion-a le Carré-like sorrow."-Publishers Weekly

The lights go out during a meeting of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party; Fernando Garrido, the general secretary, has been murdered. Pepe Carvalho, who has worked for both the party and the CIA, is well-suited to track down Garrido's murderer. This, the best-known title in the Pepe Carvalho series, features everything that is wonderful about the books: sex, politics and a most vivid sense of Spain.

Pepe is an agreeable enough detective, sort of a hard-boiled type who likes to provoke people (an orphan with no relations, he is responsible for no one but himself) and also happens to be a food lover, former communist, and former CIA employee. The book's major flaw is that Montalban gets sidetracked from the crime and delivers lengthy and excruciatingly boring details of Spanish communist party history and insider intrigues. Part of the problem lies in the book's age-originally written in 1981, only a few years after the communist party was legalized in Spain-much of this detail might have been more interesting twenty years ago. But I also think that unless one has some overwhelming interest in Spanish politics, this detail both incomprehensible and boring.

That's not the only flaw though, another problem is a more basic detecting one. I give nothing away in saying that the murder was planned to occur when all the lights went out, and yet Pepe does nothing to investigate how that might have been coordinated. The solution is given as if the murderer acted alone, however it clearly could not have been the case! In any event, I certainly wasn't inspired to rush out and read more of Pepe's adventures.