Thunder of the Roses

In this exceptional book-an attempt at what Jorge Luis Borges has called ‘the pure detective story’ - one of the greatest writers of Latin American letters is introduced to American readers for the first time. The book’s opening gambit is a stunning one: a dictator is assassinated in public, but it is soon revealed that the murdered man was a double. The real leader had been killed the night before. On the surface the question is: did the assassin know that he was after the wrong man? But later events seem to distort all sense of logic and reality, until in the final moment the circuitous routes of the labyrinth seem to straighten into a short and too inevitable line. Jorge Luis Borges has remarked in his introduction to this book that there abound, ‘as in the work of the renowned Dostoevsky, shrewd interrogations and treacherous dialogues; the spheres of the search and of what is sought are interwoven and become confused. We experience the melancholy that is the attribute of any dictatorship, the systematic oppression of stupidity, but also mockery and courage. I do not hesitate to declare that Manuel Peyrou is one of the first storytellers of Hispanic letters.’. .