“The Siege” by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Cadiz, 1811. Spain is battling for independence while America is doing the same. But in the streets of the most liberal city in Europe other battles are taking place. A serial killer is on the loose, flaying young women to death. Each of these murders takes place near the site where a French bomb has just fallen. It is the job of policeman Rogelio Tizon to find the murderer and avoid public scandal in a city already posied on the brink. Cadiz is a complex chessboard on which an unseen hand – a ruthless assassin, artillery fire, the direction of the wind, the calculation of probabilities – moves the pieces that will decide the fate of its protagonists: a corrupt and brutal policeman, the female heir to important shipping company; an unscrupulous corsair captain; a taxidermist who is also a spy, a hardened soldier, and an eccentric French artilleryman. With all the intrigue and romance of his bestsellers, THE DUMAS CLUB and THE FLANDERS PANEL, THE SIEGE is the story of a city and a people who will never be the same again.

“Arturo Perez-Reverte has long been Spain’s most popular, inventive writer of historical fiction… this is a big and bold novel, rich in character and incident”
Nick Rennison, Sunday Times 

“Arturo Perez-Reverte’s bold new thriller… The Siege is his best yet, in an excellent translation by Frank Wynne: an ambitious intellectual thriller peopled with colourful rogues and antiheroes, meticulous in its historical detail, with a plot that rattles along to its unexpected finale. It’s hard to think of a contemporary author who so effortlessly marries popular and literary fiction as enjoyably as this”