Book Review: The Painter of Battles

As a few of you know, I tend to read a lot but such activities have been curtailed a lot by grad school. Well, now that school is only a week and a half from being done and I am done with all my assignments I've gotten back into reading. As some of you also know I am a big fan of Arturo Perez-Reverte, a Spanish author probably best known for The Club Dumas (upon which the movie The Ninth Gate was loosely based), the Captain Alatriste series, and a couple others.

The basic plot of the book revovles around Falques, former war photographer, who has given up the camera and at the moment is painting a mural in a tower. The book goes back and forth between Falques interactions with a Croatian ex-soldier who shows up one day and tells Falques that a photo he took ruined his life and that he is going to kill him, and flashbacks involving his ex-lover who was killed when she stepped on a landmine in Bosnia. The only real twist comes right at the end and is a bit underwhelming. Frankly, I'd say Arturo kinda phoned this one in. The book is pretty short (200 pages) and is cut from a pretty standard Perez-Reverte cloth: downtrodden borderline anti-hero, mysterious unknowable femme fatale, sinister bad guy. Given his real life experience as a war reporter, he does bring perspective to the book but I don't think it saved the book from being much more than mediocre. If you want to read any of his books, I have all of the ones (that have been translated into English, anyway).

Rating: * *