One of the reasons that I read crime books that have been translated into English from another language is to see foreign cultures through a familiar genre lens and pick up on how their attitudes, assumptions and behaviours differ from my own British ones.

British crime books are usually soaked in small details of how our society works, the assumptions we make about each other based on external clues, the influence of class and the things we take for granted about crime, policing and the administration of justice I look for the same things in foreign crime novels.

Crime fiction may not be an accurate representation of the culture that generated it but reading it gives me the same kind of buzz that I get from people-watching in a foreign city. I may not understand everything I see but it's all made more vivid by being new and different.

'Water-Blue Eyes' took me to Vigo on the Spain's Atlantic coast. I've never been to that part of Spain so I expected it all to feel new. I hadn't expected it to feel so disorienting. The book was entertaining but I felt that some of it was slipping through my fingers. Some of this was because I lacked the context to know whether the behaviour of some of the characters is as eccentric as it seems to my British eyes or whether they are the local version of normal.

I also feel that I'm missing out on some of the humour. For example, it seems that Galicians are very resistant to giving unqualified yes or no answers to questions, which incenses a detective who has only recently transferred to the area.

The Englsh in the book is also a little odd. It's not grammatically incorrect or even hard to understand. It just sometimes sounds alien to my ears. Take the title for example. In Spanish, it was called 'Ojos de Agua' which literally means 'Water Eyes'. Clearly, that doesn't work in English, where we would quickly move towards eye-watering or watery eyes, neither of which captures the point that the murdered man in this story has startlingly blue eyes. The translator has gone for 'Water-Blue Eyes'. I've never heard water-blue used as a colour in English and certainly not as an eye colour, so the title only made sense to me once I read a description of the dead man's eyes. A lot of the English seemed that way to me: unfamiliar but comprehensible in the given context. This may have been a style choice by the translator, keeping the novel distinctively Spanish rather than British but I don't speak Spanish, so I can't tell.

Putting the foreign nature of the book to one, what was 'Water-Blue Eyes' like as a crime novel?

Well, firstly, it's not for the squeamish. The murder method was unique. vicious, cruel and horribly cold-blooded. I think it will make any man shiver at the thought of it happening to them. The violence in the book happens off-screen but it provides a constant backbeat to the story.

I found the two main detectives hard to believe in. The lead detective, Leo Caldas, seemed more focused on food, drink and jazz than on solving the crime. He was persistently moody without being introspective and he relied on his intuition to an implausible degree. His sergeant, a large short-tempered, violent man behaved so badly that It seemed the public would have been better served if his superiors had arrested him rather than giving him a badge, handcuffs and a gun. He is occasionally useful as an aid to exposition on the rare occasions when Caldas tries to order his thoughts but otherwise adds nothing to the story except chaos and some antic humour that always failed to make me smile.

Most of the plot is linear, with the pieces falling together almost despite Caldas' heavy reliance on intuition doing his work for him. It turned out that there was a reason for this and a fairly clever one which provided a twist at the end of the tale. Unfortunately, while the mechanics of the twist worked well, the delivery was a little lacklustre and felt anticlimactic.

There was enough in the story to encourage me to read the next book in the series, 'Death On A Galician Shore' but I won't be in a hurry to bring it to the top of my TBR pile. ( )

Entre el aroma del mar y de los pinos gallegos, en una torre residencial junto a la playa, un joven saxofonista de ojos claros, Luis Reigosa, ha aparecido asesinado con una crueldad que apunta a un crimen pasional. Sin embargo, el músico muerto no mantiene una relación estable y la casa, limpia de huellas, no muestra más que partituras ordenadas en los estantes y saxofones colgados en las paredes. Leo Caldas, un solitario y melancólico inspector de policía que compagina su trabajo en comisaría con un consultorio radiofónico, se hará cargo de una investigación que le llevará de la bruma del anochecer al humo de las tabernas y los clubes de jazz.

Entre el aroma del mar y de los pinos gallegos, en una torre residencial junto a la playa, un joven saxofonista de ojos claros, Luis Reigosa, ha aparecido asesinado con una crueldad que apunta a un crimen pasional. Sin embargo, el músico muerto no mantiene una relación estable y la casa, limpia de huellas, no muestra más que partituras ordenadas en los estantes y saxofones colgados en las paredes.

Leo Caldas, un solitario y melancólico inspector de policía que compagina su trabajo en comisaría con un consultorio radiofónico, se hará cargo de una investigación que le llevará de la bruma del anochecer al humo de las tabernas y los clubes de jazz. A su lado está el ayudante Rafael Estévez, un aragonés demasiado impetuoso para una Galicia irónica y ambigua, e incluso demasiado impetuoso para el propio Leo, que busca entre sorbos de vino los fantasmas ocultos en los demás mientras intenta sobrevivir a los suyos.

Gracias a la labor de este singular tándem Caldas-Estévez la verdad termina por aflorar, llevándonos a desentrañar el secreto que esconden los Ojos de agua.

Magnífica novela negra gallega. Perfecta para el verano. ( )

This is the first of the Detective Inspector Leo Caldas' series which is placed in Vigo/ Galicia (Spain). It shows some similarities with the Montalbano series because food and wine are very important but also a special colleague which is joining him. Leo Caldas is regulary guest at a radio station and therefore he is well known to a lot of people and this helps very much to get informations.
In this story a famous saxophone player was found brutally murdered in his apartment. Soon it leads to the gay scene but also to a privat hospital and its wealthy owner. It was a fast-paced and gripping reading. I'll definitely will read the second of this series, too. ( )