WHO KILLED PALOMINO MOLERO

Who killed Palomino Molero

Who killed Palomino Molero

As the last enduring child of a widow, Palomino Molero was exempt from infantry service. Indeed, Molero was not a combatant, he was a musician: He performed the guitar and sang boleros to the young women in Talara, a little Peruvian town. Yet he recruited in the Air Force. Officer Lituma and Lieutenant Silva of the Guardia municipal, investigating the brutal torture killing of Molero, soon discover that the young Cholo recruited in alignment to be beside the military base--and to be close to somebody for whom he felt a impossible love.

The major players in the killing shortly present themselves, almost of their own accord, to the bright Silva, who has vowed not to pass away until he has explained the crime and conquered the woman of his aspirations, Dona Adriana, an overweight, married temptress who spurns his advances. The major individual features emerge in pointed respite yet stay elusive and ambiguous: Richard Dufo, cruel, pain, attracting death; Colonel Mindreau, powerful and haughty, yet strangely at the clemency of his beautiful, emotionless female child, Alicia; and Alicia herself, who shares a acrid mystery with her father. Finally, there is Molero himself, a clumsy Orpheus who reaches too high in Peru's rigidly stratified humanity and is punished for his hubris.

Mario Vargas Llosa's haunting novel presents the reader with an impenetrable mystery about the human soul, about guilt, and about innocence, demanding him to present the sore task of pitying the fiendish, assessing the victim, and possibly pardoning them both.

Near an air-force groundwork in Peru in the 1950s, a juvenile airman is discovered tortured and murdered. The subsequent investigation makes an amusing and glaringly contrived mystery. In his ninth novel, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa turns to detective fiction yet still inserts his common themes of guilt versus innocence and despair at the adversity of being an honest man in a humanity founded on corruption.

This magnificent detective innovative is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the to the north wasteland, a juvenile airman is discovered murdered. Lieutenant Silva and agent Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad vehicle, they have to cajole a local cabbie into taking them to the view of the crime. Their superiors are indifferent; the instructing agent of the air base stands in their way; but Silva and Lituma are determined to uncover the truth. "Who slain ...