The Assassin's Mark

Do you have a fear of being trapped on a package tour with a group of difficult fellow tourists?  Then reading David Ebsworth's latest novel, The Assassin's Mark (#282) won't do much to change your mind. 

This murder mystery with a strong political component unfolds as a mostly British group of tourists embark on a tour of the Northern Battlefields sponsored by Generalissimo Franco's Nationalist Government during the Spanish Civil War in 1938 .  If you read my recent review of P.J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell (See my post of 2/28/13.) you know he'd be one of the first to sign up for this! 

Jack Telford's left-leaning newspaper has sent this ardent pacifist to report on the physical and political conditions in Spain, but he finds himself at odds with most of his fellow travelers and their Irish official tour guide.  Things are supposed to be safe here now (Of course there was that unfortunate accident at the hotel...), but the more Jack observes, and the more questions he asks, the more obvious it becomes to him that everything and everyone is not what they appear to be.  While Jack is fighting his own internal battles about what he believes to be the morally correct path for both Spain and the rest of Europe, he almost misses what is under his very nose.  It's almost like watching one of those horror movies when the audience knows there's a monster lurking behind that door, but the actor just has to open it...

This book made me want to dig a bit more into the history of the Spanish Civil War.  I remember visiting Spain in 1977 just after Franco died, and being struck as an American by the strong military presence everywhere in a way that I had never experienced.  It's hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for the Spaniards after forty years of living this way.  This book, as all good historical fiction does, helps put that in perspective for me.  It also helped that I had recently read Madeline Albright's memoir Prague Winter (See my post of 12/13/12.) for background on the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia.    The Assassin's Mark is not a fast read but it's a most interesting one.  That was also true of Ebsworth's first book The Jacobite's Apprentice (See my post of 10/27/12.); figuring out the politics takes some time and concentration.

But David Ebsworth paints such an appealing picture of Spain's northern Basque country, and Spanish cooking that it drove my husband to start researching a trip to Spain.  We're definitely not  taking a package tour, though!