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. ( )

I stuck with it but it never got any better for me. The two story structure was not as well done as it could have been; too long in one storyline so it always felt wrenching to go back to the other and also, what was the point of most of the early WWII story? So much that was stunningly not-relevant. When the two stories started to connect, I think it was meant to be suspenseful but I only found it contrived. Too many connections! I stared to think someone had fired up the Infinite Improbability Drive from Hitcherhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("and one wacking great bit of improbability left to account for."). I think I need to find something to read I can connect with a bit more.

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. ( )

A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson is a mystery set in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 1990s, but also a novel that has routes in World War II when Germans were looking for an escape route when the war looked to be ending, and not in their favor. The novel opens with the death of a young teen, Catarina Oliveira, who has a promiscuous past and a less-than-ideal family life. Inspector Zé Coelho is on the case, which drags him into conspiratorial intrigues and the dark, convoluted past of his home nation. Shifting back to 1941, Wilson unveils Klaus Felsen, a German businessman who is “recruited” by the German SS for a particular purpose that takes him into Spain, Portugal, and later Africa, as some Nazis, including his recruiter Lehrer, begin to see the campaign against Russia as folly. Wilson’s novel is about political regimes and how even their single-minded focus can be derailed by the most personal of matters.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2013/07/a-small-death-in-lisbon-by-robert-wilson.htm... ( )

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. ( )