The Hidden Assassins

by: Robert Wilson

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The Hidden Assassins

Riveting. In a word, that's what I felt most of the time while I read Robert Wilson's The Hidden Assassins. It's been a long time since I've read a book of this length and even longer since I wrote a review. So bare with me while I write my thoughts on it here.

In a nutshell the story is murder mystery, set in Seville Spain, with international implications. The more I read the larger the story became. A man is murdered and his identifying features - face, hands, and hair - are removed. The investigation is barely underway when an explosion in the heart of the city occurs and suddenly the murder investigation of a single man becomes an investigation into a possible terrorism attack on a mosque. The lead investigator Javier Falcón must work his way through it all as he deals with trust, love, and obsession.

I found the length of the book (453 pages) required some flipping back and forth to refresh my memory of who the characters were and what was said. Part of the problem for me was the setting for the story. I normally love stories set in other countries - I'm getting tired of stories set in the United States. But my familiarity with pronounciations of the names combined with the sheer number of names involved taxed my ability to keep it all in mind. Wilson remained true to the setting with character names that followed the various nationalities he weaves into the plot. We have Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón the key character in the book, Tateb Hassani, Yacoub Diori, and Esteban Calderón to name a few. What really tripped me up were the names of the different organizations that were involved in the investigation or running investigations of their own and the names of several companies that become part of the plot. I'm not saying I would Mr Wilson to change a thing. I am saying that you should be prepared to take notes if you really want to get the full impact of the story!

What I really enjoyed reading were the insightful perceptions of how the people perceived and interacted with the world around them - especially under stress. For example, when Consuelo Jiménez visits a psychologist for the first time. "Consuelo tried to drink the tranquillity of the pale blue walls into her mind. She had been hoping for some miraculous surgical strike on her mental disturbances, a fabulous technique to yank open the tangled mess and smooth it out into comprehensible strands. In her turmoil it hadn't occurred to her that this was going to be a process, an intrusive process." Writers have it hard trying to describe what has been described by others so many times before. Mr. Wilson did an excellent job of bringing me into the character's life.

And what is a story without a good villain? There are plenty of them in The Hidden Assassins. The problem is more of sorting out who's done what to whom and why. Some of the villains were identified early and the suspense was built on how Falcón works with his team to build a case. I imagine the pace of this to be very much like a real life murder investigation. Sometimes boring and sometimes anti-climatic.

It was the ending of the book that I rather disliked. As I read it, it had hints of being a great closing but many of the pieces that had led up to it were dropped. I felt like an inspector myself as I flipped back and forth to different pages trying to locate when facts were introduced and hints were dropped. The highlight of the book was something that I found myself hoping would develop - and in a way I knew it would. "It's always the way that, just as your mind engages elsewhere, the person you've been waiting for all this time arrives." You'll need to read The Hidden Assassins find out who.

Gregg Banse

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