I distinctly remember hearing about this book from one or two of the blogs I follow, but I can’t find your post so thank you to anyone who has recommended this book earlier in the year! I’m a big fan of mysteries and I’m always looking for more translated works, so this book appealed to me a lot.

The Silence of the White City is set in Vitoria, Basque (Spain), where a serial killer has re-appeared after twenty years. The complication: the man that was convicted of the first set of crimes is still in jail.

As a youth, Inspector Unai López de Ayala was obsessed with these ritualistic murders. Now, he’s in charge of investigating these new killings, and he’s convinced that the answer lies in the past. But will he work with the killer in jail, or will he find the truth by himself?

To be honest, the book and I got off to a rough start. The translation felt rather awkward and I felt like I was just given a lot of information. I think it’s because the book is written in first person, and a lot of the statements sound as though Unai is self-consciously telling us about what happening. Plus, there was a lot of backstory/explanatory narrative in the first chapter; for example, when we meet Estibaliz, Unai’s work partner and best friend, we’re told that they are working on following orders, that Unai turns a blind eye to “some of the addictions that still slipped into Esti’s life” while she looks the other way when he disobeys his superiors, followed by an explanation of what Unai’s speciality is (criminal profiling) and what Estibaliz specialises in. It is a lot of information, and it felt a bit awkward to be given all of that before we saw Unai and Estibaliz work the crime scene.

Thankfully, I managed to settle into the rhythm of the book after a while and enjoyed it quite a bit. I think that the middle is a bit draggy (there’s basically one really big red herring that wasted a lot of time) but when the book hit the latter half, things moved pretty quickly and the tension quickly rocketed up.

As for characters, I didn’t particularly like or dislike any of them. I found the subplot involving Unai’s love-life rather inexplicable, but then again I’m generally not a romance fan so I probably missed out on a lot of cues about how the relationship was developing.

What I really liked about this book was the setting. It was clear that the translator tried his best to retain the atmosphere of Vitoria in writing, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the city and the festivals that occurred (even if they did feel like info-dumps sometimes). I also appreciated the fact that not everything was translated – words like cuadrilla, which from googling doesn’t seem to have a perfect English translation, were left as-is, which helped me to pick up what it meant from context (rather than from an imprecise translation).

Overall, this book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the setting of the book, and the mystery was rather good once Unai was on the right track, but the translation felt a little clunky and I took so long to get used to the book and for the mystery to pick up pace that I’m a bit hesitant to pick up the second book in this series.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley

Featured Image: Photo from Canva