Published by Soho Crime on February 19, 2013
Perfect Hatred is the sixth in a series of police procedurals featuring Mario Silva, Chief Inspector for Brazil's Federal Police. He would like to be investigating an act of terrorism in São Paulo, where a baby carriage, pushed by a Muslim man disguised as a woman, explodes in front of the American consulate, killing dozens. For political reasons, that investigation is left to Hector Costa, who heads the São Paulo field office of the Federal Police, while Silva is sent to Curitiba, where Plínio Saldana, a political candidate for a governorship, has been assassinated by a man who seems to have no motive. Shortly after the candidate's bodyguard kills the assassin, the bodyguard is murdered. A third storyline involves a wealthy landowner named Orlando Muniz. Having killed a priest, Muniz needs to eliminate the prosecutor as well as the primary witness (who happens to be Mario Silva) if he wants to avoid prison.
The assassination story is couched in political and family intrigue. It seems unlikely that the incumbent governor would have orchestrated the killing, given the probability that Saldana's wife would step into his candidacy and ride the sympathy vote to an easy victory. Could Saldana's father or brother, who resented Saldana's anti-corruption platform, have hired the killer? Could his wife or his lover be the culprit? Perhaps a staff member? As in any good police procedural, the list of suspects grows as the novel progresses. The reader will suspect a connection between Saldana's death and the terrorist bombing (on the ground that interweaving plotlines always grow together), but what could it be? The answer is both surprising and satisfying.
An interesting issue arises from a character's belief that terrorism suspects forfeit their right to a fair trial by engaging in acts of terrorism (a view that, of course, assumes the authorities never err in their identification of terrorists). When a Mossad agent commits a double murder (in a fashion that echoes an act of terrorism), nobody who might be regarded as a "good guy" seems particularly troubled. Silva's sensible position (in the abstract, at least) is that the police should try harder to find the evidence needed to prove guilt rather than fretting that the guilty might go free. Yet, when a murder suspect is in a life-threatening situation, Silva must make a difficult choice whether to save him. Whether Silva makes the right decision is the kind of moral question that spells the difference between a thriller that is ordinary and one that makes the reader think.
A number of characters (many of them police investigators) circulate through the novel. Except for Muniz, who is "a psychopath with the morals of a feral cat," the characters don't have much personality. Still, this is a plot-driven novel, and the plot is entertaining if unlikely. The twin investigations are methodical, but they move the story forward at a steady pace. Occasional scenes of violence are written in vivid language, heightening the drama, and the South American settings are described in colorful detail. Despite the plotline involving terrorism, Leighton Gage is careful to avoid stereotyping or denigrating Muslims. The terrorism story is nevertheless unoriginal, featuring caricatures of terrorists, while the effort Muniz makes to kill Silva is uninspired. The best parts of Perfect Hatred kept me guessing and, since that's what a police procedural should do, I recommend it to fans of the genre.
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