Garcia-Roza, Luis Alfredo. Alone in the Crowd. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
Reason read: Brazil’s Carnival takes place in February.
Espinosa, the book worm police chief in Rio de Janeiro has a problem. An elderly woman in his district was struck dead by a bus. Despite this happening in a crowd of people, no one can say for sure what really happened. Had she been pushed or not? She could have slipped off the curb and fallen into the path of the bus. Given her age this was the likely scenario. Dozens of witnesses and no one saw a thing. Ordinarily, a police chief with dozens of other more pressing cases would call this an accident and move on, but Espinosa can’t for some reason. This same elderly woman tried to visit him earlier in the day. She had something to say to him and him alone. That one detail has Chief Inspector Espinosa thinking and the more he thinks the more his past haunts him.
Lines I liked, “The chief didn’t much believe in coincidences, especially when they resulted in death” (p 67).
Confessional: once again, I am reading books in a series out of order. Luckily, this time I only have two. Not a big deal.
Author fact: Garcia-Roza’s first claim to fame was writing textbooks for philosophy and psychology.
Book trivia: Alone in the Crowd was super short. You could read this in a weekend, which is a good thing because you will want to jump to the next book in the series immediately.
Nancy said: Pearl said mystery fans “can rejoice in reading Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s complex novels” (Book Lust To Go p 45).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the straightforward chapter “Brazil” (p 43).
~*LunaSea*~ 