Death of a nationalist

The immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War provides the bleak setting for Pawel's stirring first novel. Madrid in 1939 is filled with bomb craters, desecrated churches and nearly abandoned streets, while black markets are just about the only markets with anything to sell. The hatreds and atrocities shared by the Nationalists (supported by the fascists) and the Republicans (supported by the Communists) still simmer and erupt in sporadic violence. The Guardia Civil has the responsibility to maintain authority-and their enthusiasm and ruthlessness for enforcing order terrorizes the citizens. The intertwined fates of Sergeant Tejada Alonzo y Leon of the Guardia Civil and that of Gonzalo Llorente, a wounded Republican in hiding, are handled with unusual skill and subtlety. When Tejada arrives at the scene where a murdered comrade lies, he leaps to a conclusion about the killer's identity. He must follow a tortuous path to find the real killer and, ultimately, redemption. Gonzalo has lost his love as well as his hope for any kind of future. His one aim is for a small measure of vengeance before he dies. Pawel is unsparing in her depiction of the casual brutalities spawned by the war, but also offers evidence of the power of little civilities and kindnesses in a novel that easily transcends the formulaic crime story. (Feb.) Forecast: As genre entertainment this will be a hard sell, but it should get some serious literary attention for its 25-year-old author, who teaches Spanish in a Brooklyn high school. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Newcomer Pawel, a young Brooklyn high-school teacher, turns the clock back to 1939 and Madrid's tumultuous past. The Nationalists, on the winning side of the Civil War, are determined to restore order by viciously eliminating remnants of the Communist-backed Republican cause. When Carlos Tejada Alonso y LÉon, a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, recognizes his compadre in the siege of Toledo, Paco Lopez, as the corpse lying dead in the street, he is so incensed that he immediately executes the woman bending over to retrieve a notebook, assuming that she has killed Lopez. Determined to find out what was so important about the notebook, Tejada begins a search for its owner. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Llorente is released from the hospital to learn that his lover Viviana has been murdered. Despite his lack of identity papers and his urgent need to hide from the Falangists, he is determined to find the Guardia officer who killed her. The two men are now on a collision course that wends past black marketeers and a mysterious woman named Isabel before the whole truth about Paco's death is revealed. An intriguing juxtaposition of the political and the personal. Warning: The fainthearted may gasp at Tejada's casual cruelty, which is somewhat at odds with the denouement. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.