Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

What is explored as the background theme is the nature of dictatorship and the wounds it left behind. Pepe’s efforts to find him bring him into contact with a large and mysterious cast of characters all of whom are intimately concerned with Raul's fate. Raul is found quite quickly but disappears again and again. Pepe is in Buenos Aires to find his cousin Raul and persuade him to return to Barcelona. The mystery is both simple and complex at the same time. Perhaps because it is set in Argentina and wraps itself up in the details of the military dictatorship of the 1970s, of the 30,000 “disappeared,” and the first years of a new and supposedly liberal democracy. A GoodReads reviewer thinks that it reenergized the series. It is a much more ambitious novel than the only one I’ve read.

The Buenos Aires Quintet is one of the last Pepe Carvalho novels Montalban wrote before his death in 2003. Before The Buenos Aires QuintetI had read only The Angst-Ridden Executive. (Pepe is a minor character in one book) According to one source there are nine English translations so far. The Buenos Aires Quintet is either the nineteenth or the twentieth entry in the Pepe Carvalho series. He lives in Barcelona and his love for that city is a sustaining theme. (Apparently there is a spin-off book comprised of all the recipes in the series.) He also has the disconcerting habit of burning his books, either for kindling or to stimulate puzzle solving. He is also a gourmet cook and his recipes fill the books. For one thing he was a communist, and he worked for the CIA, and he describes himself an anarchist. Pepe Carvalho is one of the most fascinating private detectives in a literary world stuffed full of eccentric detectives.

Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán