Book description
In Who Killed Palomino Molero? Mario Vargas LLosa has turned to
detective fiction. The setting is Peru in the 1950s. Near an air force
base in the northern deserts, a young airman is found brutally
tortured and murdered. Two local policemen, Lieutenant Silva and
Officer Lituma, set out to investigate. But they are not glamorous
detectives with modern resources at their disposal; they don't even
have a squad car and have to hitch rides on chiken trucks and cajole a
local cabdriver to take them out to the scene of the crime. Not that
anyone seems eager for Silva and Lituma to capture Palomino Molero's
killer. But the two policemen persevere, and the slow and haphazard
pace of the investigation only serves to intensify the high-pitched
narrative tension, as the novel comes to haltingly rest on the very
question with which it began. Who killed Palomino Molero? is an
entertaining and brilliantly plotted mystery. It is also serious
fiction. Deftly, unobtrusively, the book takes up some of the great
themes of all of Vargas Llosa's novels: guilt and innocence, the
impossibility of justice in a society grounded in inequality and the
eternally elusive nature of the truth.
Mario Vargas-Llosa was born in Peru is 1936. He is the author of some
of the last half-century's most important novels, including The War of
the End of the World, The Feast of the Goat, Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter and Conversation in the Cathedral. In 2010 he was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature.
