'The Ignorance of Blood' by Robert Wilson

The English adore their Spanish holidays almost as much as they love queuing for buses, rooting for native-born tennis players not quite good enough for the Wimbledon finals and, of course, their pints of bitter, their noble dogs and their endless television series about ancient Roman weirdos. So it was shrewd of Robert Wilson to take the entire Iberian peninsula as the setting for his novels, which combine the quotidian details of the police procedural with the somewhat more stirring activities of the international thriller. In essence, he's creating reads for people beached beside the gloomy Thames and counting the weeks until they're noshing tapas and burning their backsides on the Costa del Sol.

Wilson's latest, "The Ignorance of Blood" (a ringing, but utterly meaningless title), is a close sequel to "The Hidden Assassins," occurring just a matter of weeks after that story, largely about a terrorist bombing of a building that housed a preschool in Seville, ended on a slightly ambiguous note. Once again, his protagonist is Javier Falcon, chief inspector of the Seville homicide squad, a troubled rationalist confronting . . . well, let's see: the Russian mafia, Islamic terrorists, multinational businessmen up to no good, bureaucratic bumbling at the higher levels of his own organization, the morally ambiguous interventions of a CIA operative, the cranky, unhelpful presence of MI5 functionaries in London and, most significantly, a deadly threat that tears at his own heart.

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Assault on integrity

The youngest son of his lover has been kidnapped and placed at murderous risk, in an attempt to corrupt Falcon. We don't know for certain who is behind this assault on his integrity, but it is the source of the novel's emotional strength. The victim is an adorable innocent, and his mother, Consuelo, is a strongly realized character -- sexy, angry, brave, driven, occasionally hysterical -- and whenever Wilson focuses on her relationship with the patient, palpably smitten Falcon, his novel leaps to life.

The book is also good when Falcon is dealing with a secret agent he's running in Morocco. Yacoub Diouri is a well-to-do businessman, a devoted family man and a homosexual who comes under insufferable, ultimately tragic pressure when it looks as if his son is about to be recruited by Jihadists while his Saudi lover is also under threat. He's a very human character, at once sad, nervous and rather more finely drawn than your average recruit to crime fiction's dark side.