THE AMBIGUITY OF MURDER

No one is particularly perturbed that Señor Guido Zavala, a womanizing, patronizing Bolivian diplomat now retired to Mallorca, is lying face down in the deep end of his pool, with bloodstains drying on an overturned chair nearby. His female staff no longer has to worry about his unwelcome pinches, his chauffeur won’t be at his beck and call night and day, and his friends are only too eager to speak ill of the dead. Into this sun-dappled carnage steps Enrique Alvarez, Cuerpo General de Policia, whose murder investigation—though it proceeds with glacial slowness, including frequent time-outs for therapeutic brandies—turns up a passel of ex-pat suspects and even a few locals. There’s the man who lost everything to Zavala in a poker game; the woman he was having an affair with and mistreating; her cuckolded husband; the party-giver who stirred the pot by introducing all the ex-pats to one another; and the English couple who paled on meeting Zavala, tormented by memories of imprisonment due to the Bolivian’s lies. There’s also a touch of blackmail, drug-running, and Alvarez’s huffy sister-in-law, who comes to his rescue when alibis and more are exploding all around him while Salas, his sarcastic supervisor, stands aloof.

A bit less congenial than its 32 predecessors (An Enigmatic Disappearance, 2000, etc.), with a plot baked dry in the Mallorca sun and a pace so sluggish that readers, unless they’re more motivated than Alvarez, will soon be joining him in a restorative nap.