‘Blood Wedding’ by P J Brooke
Published by Constable, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-84529-741-1  

I've read and greatly enjoyed Donna Leon writing about Italy and Florence with detective Commisario Brunetti and Barbara Nadel writing about Turkey and Istanbul with Inspector Cetin Ikumen and I guess that there are others that I have yet to discover,  but now I can confidently add Spain and Granada with Sub Inspector Max Romero.  Blood Wedding  is the first in this new series written by P.J.Brooke  a name which conceals a joint authorship of a husband and wife team.  The Spanish setting and background are concerned particularly with the Spanish Civil War and descriptions of modern day Granada and of the villages in the Sierra Nevada.  The title and most of the quotations in the book are taken from the poems and plays of  the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca who was shot by the Civil Guard.  His most famous work Blood  Wedding, or in Spanish Bodas de Sangre, has echoes of words and themes throughout this book.

The chief connection is made by the beautiful Moslem girl,  Leila, of  Scottish/Egyptian birth who is researching for a PhD on village life during the Civil War from the University of Edinburgh,  and she has come to Granada and to the village of Diva to interview local people who were alive during that war.  One person she interviews is Paula,  the grandmother of the policeman Max Romero and whose brother Antonio was killed in the war.  The link is made to the present by actually giving some of the tapes of these interviews.

At five in the afternoon,  at  "las cinco en punto de la tarde", echoes through the Lorca poem and through the novel and it is the precise time when Leila is picked up in the car by the man who is going to murder her.  Her body is found under a bridge in a ravine and Max is called in because of his knowledge of English and Moslem customs.  The chief suspect is a young Moslem who is suspected of working for a terrorist group.  The Moslem terrorist connections dominate the police investigations and the book at times,  but there are many attractions .  Max belongs to a large and colourful family which is dominated by the figure of the grandmother and there is the background of Granada and the mountains of the Sierra Nevada providing  fascinating sights,  smells and sounds.  Sometimes the story is almost lost in these descriptions. It is difficult to capture the various sources of enjoyment in this novel.   As a one-time student of Spanish,  I found it completely absorbing and entertaining.  I look forward to reading book number two in the series.