User:Paddy Apling/Blood Wedding (novel by P J Brooke)

Blood Wedding is the first novel of the husband and wife team of Philip O'Brien and Jane Brooke. The title is taken from the famous play of the same name from the Spanish poet and playright, Frederico Garcìa Lorca, asassinated by the Franco forces in 1936, and is emphasised with quotations from that poet on many of the chapter headings.

In the general form of the detective novel, its plot concerns the mysterious death of a British Muslem girl, Leila, in a small country town of Andalusia, not far from Granada. The narrator of the story is a newly-appointed, graduate entry, Sub-Inpector in the Granada police force, Max Romero, whose main responsibility is to help in relations with the local Muslim community.

He is involved in the case simply in a consultant capacity, but the development of the enquiries rapidly bring him into learning of his own family involvement on both sides of the Civil War, which most Spaniards are attempting to refuse to remember.

Max rapidly finds himself at loggerheads with the aggressive Chief Inspector Gonzalez, who regards him with suspicion as an academic upstart, and initially wishes the death to be regarded as accidental.