Review: Murder of Garcia Lorca gives backdrop to chilling tale

The title is taken from Federica García Lorca’s poem Canción de Jinete and the poet’s work permeates the novel as a motif and it is his unsolved murder which sparks off the plot of this thriller. However initially, there’s a sort of fug of too many characters: nationalist, internationalist and Spanish, blocking the story from freeflow.

There are longueurs and consecutive streams of minutiae such as page-long descriptions of rolling a cigarette. And, regarding a minor character a volunteer from Catalonia Josef Aixala, do we need to know that “the rows of buttons studding the breeches gave his calves the strange outline of an overgrown insect?”