THE QUEEN OF THE SOUTH
by Arturo Perez-Reverte
trans Andrew Hurley
Picador £16.99 pp436

“I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.” This is not a collaboration between Borges and Marquez, but the opening sentence of a novel by the Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon that has become a best-seller across Europe. On the jacket there is even a puff from the German vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer, who says he stayed up all night to finish it.

What Zafon offers by the shovel- load to German vice-chancellors and others is escapism. Set in a picturesquely decaying Barcelona of the 1940s and 1950s, with flashbacks to the civil war and earlier, The Shadow of the Wind is at heart an old-fashioned adventure yarn, thoroughly marinated in gothic romanticism. It owes as much to Rider Haggard as Borges or Marquez.

The boy who visits the literary mausoleum on that memorable day is Daniel, the son of an antiquarian book dealer. It is an invariable rule of novel-writing that antiquarian book dealers must be engagingly eccentric, and Daniel is surrounded by such characters. At the Cemetery of Forgotten Books he is allowed to choose one book from the labyrinthine stacks. His fingers light on an obscure title — The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. Daniel becomes obsessed with the shadowy life and even more shadowy supposed death of the book’s creator — not least because a mysterious figure, his features horribly disfigured by burns, has been setting light to the few remaining copies of it. As Daniel turns detective, he begins to discover uncanny parallels between Carax’s life and his own.

The book could have done with a strong-willed editor (the atmosphere of mystery is sometimes flagged up rather than being allowed to speak for itself), but Zafon spins his increasingly complex yarn dextrously. There are well-composed set pieces featuring deserted mansions, alluring women and night-time pursuits through the alleys of the Spanish city. (We read also on the jacket that the author is living in Los Angeles and working as a scriptwriter.) But for all the skill, there is, for this reader at least, an air of fakery. Call it postmodern allusion if you like, but the characters seem hand-me-downs — notably in the case of the pantomime villain, a Francoist police chief. For those who like their escapism dark and melodramatic, the novel could provide a good week’s beach reading. For the more hard-hearted, it remains a piece of hokum.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s magnificent The Queen of the South is adventure of a different order — with a modern cutting edge and the moral depth and doubt of reality. It tells the story of Tereza Mendoza, who rises from being a small-time narco’s moll in Mexico to practically single-handedly running the heroin and cannabis trade into Europe across the Straits of Gibraltar. She becomes the object of the media’s telephoto lens — a woman with powerful political connections, the ruthless “Queen” of southern Spain’s criminal aristocracy. But there are always debts to be paid.

Perez-Reverte’s realisation of this world (researched to an almost hallucinatory level of detail) is enough to transfix the reader. One feels one could plan one’s own international drug-running operation out of its pages. But the novel goes a long way beyond journalism, for Tereza’s journey is not just a physical roller coaster of action and violence, but also a spiritual quest that acquires its own perverted clarity. Combining action and atmosphere in a manner reminiscent of the American writer Robert Stone, the book casts rape, cold-blooded murder and white-knuckle speedboat chases into an almost poetic tone of melancholy fatalism. It takes the reader not only into a strange physical world, but also into an alien moral universe with its own rules of honour and right conduct. It is, quite simply, a stunning novel, one of the best I have read in recent years.

Available at the Books First price of £10.39 (Zafon) plus £2.25 p&p and £13.59 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy