To The Last Page

This Brutal Moon takes off right where it left off at the end of On Vicious Worlds , the second book in the Kindom trilogy . Which is where everything, or almost everything, is in a bit of a mess, and when I say mess, I'm not referring to the plotting or its complexity. That is easy to pick up even if you read the last book like I did a year ago. I won't give a summary of where we are now or how we got here. If you've read the first two books you'll know, if you haven’t it won't make any sense, but as a reviewer you still want to keep a review as free from spoilers as possible. So when I say mess, I of course mean a good mess, with the Kindom in turmoil, the fate of some of its characters unknown, the Treble facing rebellion and promising a brutal put down. Those most at risk from the vengeance of First Cloak Seti Moonback, the self-styled Kess, are of course the Jeveni refugees on Capamame. Betrayed from within by spies working for the Kindom, Seti has the key to ...

Tomás Nevinson opens, as you might expect in a novel by Javier Marías, with a long preamble to set the scene. It's not an uncommon subject that he contemplates, but one that has been thought about and speculated upon by many others. What if someone has taken one of the many opportunities or been successful in an attempted assassination of Hitler before he became responsible for the deaths of millions of people? But how could anyone have known what he would become?  There is a good reason why this subject might be of interest to the narrator of Tomás Nevinson - who is Tom himself - and the reason you could say was already proposed by a longer preamble to this book, although I doubt there is any way that anyone could consider the author’s previous novel (which would turn out to be his penultimate work), Berta Isla as merely a preamble. As far as Tomás Nevinson is concerned however - the book and the husband of Berta Isla that is - his activities as an undercover operative, spy, ag...