A Thousand Cuts

May 1, 2017
Brisk pacing and sharply rendered characters help offset the overly convoluted plot of Mogford’s fifth novel featuring Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti (after 2015’s Sleeping Dogs). After he agrees to represent Christopher Massetti, an alcoholic old man, in a harassment case, the complainant—Dr. Eloise Capurro—is killed in a fire. When another woman tangentially connected to the case turns up dead, Sanguinetti begins finding connections between Massetti and an explosion that killed two naval engineers on the Royal Navy dockyard in Gibraltar during WWII. The saboteur, revolutionary Esteban Reyes, was executed, but the revelation that he was Massetti’s father forces Sanguinetti to look carefully at the specifics of the 1940 act of terrorism, and he soon finds a conspiracy that implicates some of Gibraltar’s most influential families. Complicating matters for Sanguinetti are a pregnant fiancée and a morally bankrupt business partner. The superficial exploration of these personal dynamics, however, makes for an emotionally flat read. Agent: Nicola Barr, Greene & Heaton (U.K.).

May 1, 2017
The melancholy that has been hanging heavily on lawyer Spike Sanguinetti's shoulders through four episodes in Mogford's richly atmospheric, Gibraltar-set series appears to be lifting. He is engaged to policewoman Jessica Navarro, who is pregnant with the couple's child, and while Spike is concerned about balancing his new responsibilities as husband and father with his ongoing role as caregiver to his own father, he is determined to look toward a happier future. Until the past intrudes again, this time in the form of an unsolved murder stretching back to 1940. Jumping between the present and wartime Gibraltar, Mogford unspools an intricate tale concerning Gibraltarian nationalists struggling to free themselves of British domination, even as the Nazis turn their eyes toward the strategic advantages of occupying a peninsula that almost bridges Europe and Africa. Throughout the series, Mogford has explored the multicultural tensions that define contemporary Gibraltar, and this time he ups the ante by adding a fascinating historical layer to that ambiguity-drenched cultural stew. Sanguinetti, naturally, feels caught in the middle as the riptide of present and past threaten to engulf him and those he loves. An essential international crime series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)