A Crack in the Wall

Starred review from June 17, 2013
An old secret comes back to haunt 45-year-old Buenos Aires architect Pablo Simó in Argentinian author Piñeiro’s best crime novel yet. One day, an attractive woman of about 25, Leonor, stops by Simó’s office and asks him and his two coworkers, Borla and Marta, if they know Nelson Jara. Simó, Borla, and Marta are aware that Jara is dead, buried “under the concrete floor of the parking lot, exactly where they left him that night, three years ago,” but the three deny knowing him or his whereabouts. Later, Leonor runs into Simó at a cafe, where she asks him for help with a photography assignment. The development of the relationship between the architect and Leonor plays out against the backstory of how Jara wound up under the parking lot. Piñeiro (All Yours) keeps the reader hooked right up to the wicked, if logical, ending.

August 1, 2013
A highly metaphorical crack in a wall that isn't even his splits open the middle-class facade of a Buenos Aires architect's life. Nothing moves very fast at Borla and Associates, where Pablo Simo still hasn't made associate after 20 years. The one time the firm skated close to the wind was when crabby old Nelson Jara, who lived next door to the Calle Girbone project, claimed that the construction had produced a widening crack in his interior wall. Pablo listened to his complaint, put him off with vague promises, then showed up at the construction site to find his boss, Borla, and their secretary Marta Horvat, standing over Jara's corpse. An accident, insisted Borla; instead of risking the long delays that a police investigation would entail, it would be better for everyone if they simply buried the body and let the unwitting cement contractors pour the foundation over the impromptu gravesite. But that was three years ago, and the only disturbances to Pablo's humdrum work life and marriage have been his wife Laura's occasional bad moods, his daughter Francisca's growth into a teenager and his constant sexual fantasies about Marta. Everything changes when photography student Leonor Corell walks into the office of Borla and Associates asking to see Jara. As if in a trance, Pablo, who's already had frequent daydreams in which he's advised by his old school friend Tano Berletta and haunted by Jara, lets Leonor seduce him, loosening his last bonds to a perfectly ordinary life he suddenly realizes has never been his to begin with. Pineiro (All Yours, 2011, etc.) unfolds her story, and the social indictment behind it, as placidly as an Argentine Patricia Highsmith at her gentlest.

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