In 2019, 3 years after The Water Rituals, the life of Inspector Unai, the Kraken, is going well. He is with Alba. They have a 2 year old daughter, Deba. He has almost fully recovered from Broca’s Aphasia.
The Vitoria police are stressed by the disappearance of the 12 and 17 year old Nájera sisters.
The structure of the book is intriguing. Sáenz has written a Lords of Time book about 1192 that is contained with her Lords of Time book of 2019. They are two independent books. As well, there is a chronicle from the Middle Ages providing source material on the events in the 12th Century.
At the eagerly awaited book launch in 2019 for The Lords of Time book about 1192, Antón Lasaga, a wealthy textile businessman, is found dead in a bathroom.
In the 1192 story Count Don Diago Vela has returned to Victoria, which was the name of Vitoria in the 12th Century, after a 2 year journey. He arrives to find his betrothed, Onneca, has just married his brother, Nagorno. Rushing to the home of her father, Count Furtado de Maestu, he is just in time to join the witnesses to the consummation of the marriage in the matrimonial bed. (They are there to confirm there is a bloodstain showing the bride was a virgin.) Hours later, Count de Maestu is found dead.
Both Lasaga and De Maestu have died from being poisoned by Spanish Fly (cantharis), the aphrodisiac made from “the crushed shell of the blister beetle”.
Unai and Count Diago set out to find the killers over 800 years apart.
Once again Sáenz has created yet another form of riveting ritual death to rival the means of murder in the earlier books which featured stuffing bees in the mouth of unconscious victims and a form of drowning with the victims lowered into pots of water.
In 2019 Unai orders a search for the source of the Spanish Fly. It is banned. He learns Blister beetles were recently stolen from the Museum of Natural Sciences.
Count Diago is also searching for Spanish Fly. While not on sale in the marketplace Spanish Fly is available in 1192.
Looking for the author of the fictional fictional Lords of Time Unai and his aide, Esti, go to the NograroTower in the Valdegovía Valley to see Ramiro Alvar Nograro, the 25th Lord Nograro. A shy man, really a recluse, he is an intellectual under 40 years of age and never leaves the Tower. The Lord they meet, Alvar Nograro, says he is the 24th Lord and is a very handsome man “wearing a cassock and a delicately embroidered scarlet chasuble”. The psychological issues are striking and complicated.
Count Diago had been on a secret mission for King Don Sancho the Wise to take Berenguela to marry Richard the Lion-Hearted.
Ritual murders of young people take place in 2019 in the same ways as set out in the fictional fictional The Lords of Time.
At the body of a boy Unai genuflects and recites to himself his mantra:
“This is where your hunt ends, and mine begins.”
Tasio Ortiz de Zarate of the first book, The Silence of White City, returns to Vitoria. He wants to see Deba. In the 12th Century young aristocratic women might be immurred, walled up in a church with an opening for food and water.
Who connects the current fictional fictional The Lords of Time about 1192 and the ancient chronicle for the plots are almost the same?
The villains past and present are fiendishly clever and brutal. Danger lurks in the past and present. The body counts increase.
In Victoria conflicts rage between the aristocrats and the common folk. How will Count Diablo solve the murder of Count de Maestru amidst the violence enveloping the town?
As Alba and Unai explore the tangled past of the NograroTower Deba is taken care of by Unai’s 100 year old grandfather and his brother, German.
Unai is a reflective man:
“.... contemplating Locards’ principle that every criminal leaves some trace of themselves.
What I was about to discover is that the same is true for every act of love.”
Unai considers a comment about a town “full of bastards”. He is advised there are “children born to an official mistress who was faithful to her man”, “children born of incest”, children born to concubines - “Women who cohabit with Catholic priests”, nuns and “children born to an adulterous woman whose husband brings them up as his own”.
The traces from love or more accurate sex are unexpected and devastating. The complications and consequences of illicit love are endless.
The story in Victoria moves to 1199. It remains a turbulent time with a vicious war.
In the present, assumption, as always, proves misleading for Unai. There is a fundamental flaw in his reasoning in the tracing of a deceased member of the Alvar family.
Unai is convinced psychopaths cannot be “rehabilitated”:
They don’t respond to therapy …. Why? Because psychopathy isn’t an illness; it’s a way of being.”
His grandfather is attacked while taking care of Deba and she is taken. Unai freezes and his aphasia returns. Because of “cognitive dissonance” he cannot determine who to help first.
How Saenz connects the past of the 12th Century and the present of the 21st Century to the end of the book is so clever.
At the end of the book there is a self-reflection on the past, the present and the future by Unai about himself and his family and his city. Few books extend such reflection over 800 years. I received in Norway a decade ago a family tree for the ancestry of my great-grandmother that goes back to 1,000 A.D. when a Viking in the Lofoten Islands converted to Christianity. I am a rarity in Western Canada to be able to trace my family for a millennium. Spain is different and its ancient heritages let authors create a depth to their works that is impossible in North America.
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