Even though the local police captain declines to perform his agency’s part of the investigation, Chacaltana comes to believe that death has the markings of a terrorist act. Chacaltana, a well-intentioned yet odd and naive functionary, is called upon to investigate a severely burned body found in a hayloft. The story takes place between March 9 and May 3, 2000, some seven and a half years after the Shining Path’s leader was captured and the organization fell into decline. The Ayacucho Region was not only where the Shining Path ( Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist revolutionary organization, committed what it called its first “act of war” against the Peruvian government, it was one of the areas of the country hardest hit by the brutal tactics of both the terrorist and counter-terrorist forces. Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar has voluntarily transferred from a post in Lima, the nation’s capital, to his childhood home of Ayacucho, the capital of a political region of the same name in the Andes Mountains. Red April, the first book by Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo to be translated into English, is built around Peru’s deadly internal warfare of the late 20th Century. If that is true, at least we can be thankful that violence doesn’t stem from political warfare. Although some see that as simply a reflection of reader interest in mysteries or thrillers, others have suggested it reflects an American fascination with violence. It is an electrifying novel.Scan almost any American bestseller list and you’re probably going to find a crime novel. Remarkable for the self-assured clarity of its style, the inexorable momentum of its exposition, and the complexity of its concerns, Red April works brilliantly on the deepest historical, social, and psychological levels. As the investigation proceeds, in propulsive twists and turns, Saldívar will be compelled to confront what it means to be moral in a corrupt and brutal society while witnessing what happens to both the individual and society when death becomes the only certainty in life. But he has just been put in charge of an investigation into a bizarre murder that may be linked to Peru's infamous terrorist group, the Shining Path. Up to this moment, he has lived a life in which nothing particularly good or bad has ever happened to him. Mother-haunted, wife-abandoned, literature-loving, quietly eccentric Félix Chacaltana Saldívar is a hapless, by-the-book, unambitious prosecutor living in Lima. In the wake of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, a chilling, internationally acclaimed political thriller by one of Latin America's most important young writers.

Red april santiago roncagliolo