the secret in their eyes book review

Suspend Your Disbelief

The secret in their eyes, by eduardo sacheri.

Popular Argentinian writer Eduardo Sacheri has said that "writing is a special way to read." In this review of The Secret in Their Eyes , Denise Delgado explores the similarities and differences between Sacheri's first novel and the Academy-Award winning film adaptation he helped write.

by Denise Delgado

Argentine writer Eduardo Sacheri published four best-selling short story collections (how often do you encounter those last five words in sequence?) before The Secret in Their Eyes (Other Press), his first novel, but most U.S. readers may be unfamiliar with his fiction. Many will decide to pick it up for the same reason I did: they were moved and haunted by El secreto de sus ojos , its fantastic Academy Award-winning film adaptation . Sacheri collaborated on the screenplay, so it’s fair to bring the film into this discussion—later. The strengths of Sacheri’s novel differ from those of the film.

Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read,” and here Chaparro’s writing constitutes a close reading of—even as it’s mixed with the feeling he’s tampering with—the experiences implicating a group of characters. Included in his account are his alcoholic but cunning assistant and best friend Pablo Sandoval; Irene Hornos, a court judge and the woman Chaparro has secretly loved for nearly thirty years; the crime victim, Liliana Colotto, and her widower, Ricardo Morales; and Isidoro Gómez, Liliana’s attacker turned henchman for the Argentine government. Chaparro’s tone is by turns ironic, self-deprecating, questioning, and sincere.

Through both chance and disposition, the crime makes Chaparro a sort of unwilling detective. The Secret ‘splot employs the familiar patterns of a mystery or detective novel. Sacheri, who also teaches high school and university-level history and economics, is interested in literature that is preoccupied with ordinary lives but also grapples with socio-political, historical, and philosophical questions. In a recent interview, he articulated a belief that literature’s complexity should emanate from the multiplicity of contacts it allows the reader—with other reading, with his or her own interiority, with that of other people:

At times I’ve seemed to notice that for some, the most laudable form of complexity is opacity… An author who contemplates his navel and a reader condemned to the contemplation of some other person’s navel. I’ll sound unforgivably profane, but that concept doesn’t satisfy me. Not as an author and not as a reader.

The detective/mystery plot serves Sacheri’s position well. I think of Roberto Bolaño , Julio Cortázar (Sacheri cites his earlier work as a major influence), and even Alice Munro as other writers who have used the popular form masterfully as a way to engage with rigorous ideas and create rich, complex experiences in the mind of the reader. Sacheri’s novel experiments in this way with tone rather than form. Some scenes have a madcap, schmaltzy quality—as when Chaparro and Sandoval collaborate to trick an uppity judge into signing off on some court documents—reminiscent of the most satisfying TV comedy writing. These moments are entertaining to read, and they also serve to fully render character and illuminate the weaknesses of the court system through humor. In this way, the novel indeed plays with form differently than both traditional detective novels and its film adaptation.

The book’s complex structures are a strength, serving its particular themes. In an author’s note, the mention of “the bloody Argentina of the 1970s, which occasionally appears as the background of the story narrated here” strikes me as a sardonic understatement. Chaparro picks up on a photographic clue that helps identify Isidoro Gómez as a suspect, and his comment that “…I’ve always liked looking at things a little sidelong, focusing on the background instead of the foreground,” points us to a way of looking at the novel as a whole; its historical “background” is equally significant.

In the film adaptation, the period surrounding Argentina’s Cámpora government and its Dirty War indeed functions as a menacing, all-pervasive backdrop. In the novel, John Cullen’s translator’s note provides critical information for readers who come to the book without knowledge of this time period, providing explanations like the following:

[A] time of great turbulence in Argentina culminated in the so-called Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During these years, Argentina was the chief sponsor of massive and systematic political violence, whose victims included…students, activists, trade unionists, teachers, journalists, and leftists in general. In such an unstable and dangerous environment, even the basically apolitical Chaparro is at risk.

This environment transcends setting to become both structural enclosure and subject matter. It has a direct impact on the court system where Chapparo works as well as the crime’s ultimate consequences for Morales, Gómez, and Chapparo himself.

The complex hierarchies of the court judicial system and the labyrinthine vault where cold case files are archived are Borgesian labyrinths where power, guilt, and accountability are distributed and refracted between people and the systems that bind them together. Indeed, Chaparro often struggles with the shady boundary between the implicit and the complicit. He frequently calls attention to the way personal attitudes and actions—often his own—can incriminate individuals. “We’re all cowards, it’s just a question of who frightens us enough,” he reflects after finding a colleague with military connections has secured an order to suspend Liliana Colotto’s murder investigation indefinitely. Chaparro wishes that the judge in charge of the case had held his corrupt colleague accountable: “My stomach turned at the thought of that son of a bitch getting away with such rank malfeasance,” he says, but then admits, “but after all, I was idle and pusillanimous too, in my way…The interview with Batista left a bitter taste in my mouth. I felt somehow implicated in this injustice done to some and the sinister impunity granted to others.” How are individuals implicated when systems are corrupt? What is the mechanism by which those implicated become complicit? Who is responsible for justice and punishment in the absence of a trustworthy state? How does violence at the state level breed violence between individuals?

In the film, Irene is the pivotal character in this interrogation—gorgeous, self-possessed, and very pregnant. Until this point, we’re not entirely sure Isidoro Gómez is capable of the crime he’s suspected of committing. His claims of innocence seem convincing. He comes off scared and timid and somewhat bewildered. But Irene surmises correctly that if he’s the right one, hitting him where it hurts will cause a certain effect. She dismisses him as a viable suspect based on his lack of masculinity and strength, speculating aloud in blunt terms why surely he can’t be the one. And this is finally what makes him lose it: he punches her in the face and defiantly screams his confession in the most vile and violent detail.

This use of her character and the issue of her pregnancy resonates on several levels. It creates a parallel with Liliana Colotto, who was two months pregnant at the time of her rape and murder. We rarely ever see this variant on justice: a young pregnant woman ingeniously provoking a man into an indignant declaration of guilt for a violent crime against another young pregnant woman. It’s both Irene’s sexuality and vulnerability in this moment that allow her to wield power—she secures the confession they need to send Gómez to jail—and modulate the accumulation and release of tension in the scene. The film’s somewhat richer development of character (and by extension, plot and parallels between characters) ratchets up the emotional stakes and rings on a deeper psychological register than the novel.

But what’s less visible in the film is one of the book’s great strengths: the trope of the novel within the novel. Chaparro is uncertain about the whole enterprise—why he wants to tell this story, if he should be writing it, and what it’s really about: “…[I]t’s not my story I want to tell,” he writes by way of introduction, “it’s Morales’s story, or Isidoro Gomez’s, which is the same story but seen from the other side, or seen upside down, or something like that.” His uncertainty allows readers to witness his writing as a process, and, as a result, this foregrounds the construction of the story as a whole. The novel alternates between third-person chapters narrated through Chaparro’s consciousness, titled with words and phrases like “Retirement Party,” “Cinema,” and “Coffee;” and Chaparro’s numbered, first-person-narrated manuscript chapters. These chapters are even typeset in different fonts. In “Cinema,” we read that “[Chaparro]’s anxious about how to continue, how to recount what happened to those people. He wonders if that’s the feeling writers have when they tell a story, a certain sense of omnipotence as they play with their characters’ lives.” Later:

Chaparro rereads the opening sentences of his new chapter and hesitates. Is that a good way to start this part of the story? he wonders…Can a single human action—in this case, a monumental drinking binge—be the cause that changes another’s destiny, assuming that such a thing as destiny exists?

The crime that ties Chaparro to Liliana Cotorro, Ricardo Morales, and Isidro Gómez is a bloody and visceral metaphor for Sacheri’s exploration of the relationship between a single human action and its consequences. The Secret of Their Eyes (originally La pregunta de sus ojos , or The Question of Their Eyes) is a supremely accessible novel and a thrilling page-turner whose most nuanced tensions lie in the relationships between its structures and characters and the questions that these pose. Sacheri says that the book is “a reflection on punishment.” Readers are invited to ask, who is responsible? How are we all implicated? And how is the longing for love like the longing for justice?

Further Links and Resources

• Learn how The Secret in Their Eyes went from novel to film in this New York Times article .
• Listen to an NPR interview with director Juan José Campanella.

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The Secret in Their Eyes

Written by Eduardo Sacheri John Cullen (trans.) Review by James Hawking

Set in Argentina before and after the period known as the Dirty War, this is the story of Benjamin Chaparro, a retired detective who is writing a book looking back on the investigation of a brutal rape and murder. The Oscar for the best foreign film of 2010 was awarded to a movie of the same title roughly based on the novel. The book is more about personal lives than the political situation, but the corrupt regime of the colonels creates the conditions for acts of private revenge. The murderer is exposed through clever interrogation, but he is released long before his term. The relationship between the detective and the victim’s husband is one of the main threads of the story. The other is Chaparro’s love for a woman, once his co-worker, but now a judge.

The translation has to find equivalents for a number of Argentine epithets, such as boludo (translated as asshole) sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. For the ubiquitous puta , he finds numerous equivalents depending on the contexts. Some Argentine references are inexplicably altered. In the original, someone confessing was said to sing “como Patuto Ortega,” a popular singer who had a second career as a provincial governor, but the translation inexplicably uses the better-known but less contemporary tango master Carlos Gardel in the comparison. However, on the whole the translation keeps the faith with an exciting and complex novel.

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THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

by Eduardo Sacheri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2011

A view of the world as a dark place illuminated by personal loyalties.

A brutal murder is the starting point for this strange, compelling journey through Argentina’s criminal-justice system; the Argentinian writer’s 2005 novel inspired the same-named film that won the 2009 Foreign Language Oscar.

Buenos Aires, 1968. Chaparro is a deputy clerk in the Palace of Justice. That title suggests a nobody. He’s not. He oversees police work at crime scenes, such as the murder of Liliana Colotto, a young married schoolteacher. She has been raped and strangled. The conscientious 28-year-old also accompanies the detective to inform her husband, a bank teller. Chaparro bonds with the devastated Morales, who is not under suspicion, and intervenes when two dark-skinned workmen from the building are brought in and roughed up, blatant racial profiling. He has them released and files a complaint against their accusers; then, with masterful insight, he singles out the likely suspect as Morales is sorting through old photographs. One young man, Gómez, is gazing at the future victim, the adoration clear in his eyes. Chaparro’s hunch proves correct, but the whereabouts of the presumed killer are unknown, so Chaparro must bend the rules to keep the case from being sealed. All this intrigue is handled beautifully, as are the subsequent twists and turns: the arrest of Gómez four years later on an unrelated charge, his imprisonment, his surprise release and Chaparro’s own sudden vulnerability (he must be whisked out of town to a safe jurisdiction). Morales is memorable, too, a baleful presence intent on only one thing: revenge. Still, the novel is hardly without flaws. There is a secondary story line: Chaparro’s undeclared, lifelong love for a married judge. The story starts languidly with Chaparro’s retirement and his decision to write about the Morales case. At intervals, the clerk turned writer pauses to wonder how he should proceed. These are irritating distractions from the novel’s theme: a good man working to secure justice in a fractured system. 

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-59051-451-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011

THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BOOK REVIEW

by Eduardo Sacheri ; translated by Mara Faye Lethem

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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BOOK TO SCREEN

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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by Kathy Reichs

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BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Book Review: “The Secret in Their Eyes” — An Impressive Work of Art

The novel is a brilliant psychological thriller and several other things as well—a very quiet love story, a narrative of a remarkable friendship between two men, and an exploration of the corruption rampant in Argentine politics in the late 60s and 70s.

The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri. Translated by John Cullen. Other Press, 320 pages, $15.95.

By Roberta Silman

By sheer coincidence my husband and I watched the movie of this book while I was reading it, and reading and seeing simultaneously became an interesting lesson in something very rare: a wonderful movie made from a wonderful book. (A friend of mine once said that only second-rate books make wonderful movies; her example was Sophie’s Choice , but we won’t get into that now.) In any case, there seemed some logic in the coincidence, since the movie actually came out and won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2010 before the book was published in English, and on its cover there is a medallion that reads “Basis for the Oscar-winning film.”

It is easy to see why moviemakers were drawn to this material because it is a brilliant, psychological thriller and several other things as well—a very quiet love story, a narrative of a remarkable friendship between two men, and an exploration of the corruption rampant in Argentine politics in the late 60s and 70s when the country was plunged into the “DirtyWar” that wrought such untold suffering on so many of its citizens. The book is also an investigation into the problems of writing a novel, especially when so much of it is based on the past, yet a past that still reverberates so powerfully in the present.

Although Sacheri is still young (he was born in 1967), he has absolute command of all these divergent threads, and although his protagonist, Benjamin Chaparro, seems to be working his way through the problem of how to tell his somewhat complicated tale, the reader is never confused by what happened when.

In crystal clear prose, the book begins when Chaparro, a loner who has harbored a secret love for one of his colleagues, who has been married, unsuccessfully, twice, and who is now retired from his job as a detective, is faced with that awful question: What is he going to do with the rest of his life? He is so engaging that his musings never feel like whining, and when he decides to try his hand at writing about a brutal murder that has haunted him for more than 25 years, the reader is happy to go along.

One beautiful May morning in the Buenos Aires of 1968, a young woman, Liliana, recently married and two months pregnant, was raped and strangled for no apparent reason leaving her widowed husband, Ricardo, totally devastated and unable to think about anything but revenge. Moving from the present tense and the third person to tell us about himself now and the past tense and the first person to narrate the past, Benjamin reveals his frustration at sorting out the details of the murder, which he solved by searching the faces in some photos shown to him by Ricardo.

The young and talented author Eduardo Sacheri.

There is a catch, though. Although the murderer was tried and imprisoned, he has been released because of a personal vendetta waged against Benjamin by one of his former colleagues, a grudge only possible within the framework of the corruption at that time. The question now is What has happened to Isidoro Gomez, the young murderer who pined for Liliana and decided soon after her marriage that if he couldn’t have her, no one else would.

So we realize as we read, there are two mysteries here—the murder in the past and how it was solved and the disappearance of the murderer, which no one but Benjamin seems to care about, especially because his dear friend, Pablo Sandoval, the brilliant drunk with whom he worked so closely, is dead. There is also the mystery inherent in Benjamin’s secret love. Here he is, realizing how he managed to find the murderer by looking at the photograph of Gomez looking at Liliana:

Gomez’s way of looking at Liliana had indeed called my attention to him, and I’d interpreted his gaze as a silent, futile message to a woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand it; all that was true. But I’d noticed that look because—and this is what I hadn’t told Baez—I myself had gazed at a woman in just that way. It had been fourteen months since I’d first met her, and as I’d often done in those fourteen months, once again on that hot night in December 1968, I bitterly regretted that she wasn’t my wife.

By revealing so much of what Benjamin feels, both then and now, Sacheri does the exact opposite of what you might expect. Never getting in the least bit sentimental, he uses Benjamin’s secret to ratchet up the intensity and urgency of his search into the past. By braiding these strands together, you have the feeling that Benjamin’s need to find the answers is exactly what it turns out to be: a matter of life and death. Because, in the end, the widower Ricardo’s life and his blind need for vengeance turns out to be the saddest of all—the proof that grief and suffering can lead to a kind of madness that can never be totally explained.

I loved this book too much to give away its ending but was very surprised to see how different it was from the movie. Because the book is quieter and Benjamin’s secret is more nuanced, it poses more questions and lingers in the mind. But when you see what the producers of the movie did, you can understand their need to make it more violent and hard-hitting, creating an almost breathless tension in the last third of the film. Yet, they also manage to develop a love story that is both believable and touching and, even, hilarious in its missed chances.

So here we have two impressive works of art from the mind of this young, talented writer named Eduardo Sacheri. Indeed, anyone interested in exploring the process of how a book becomes a prize-winning screenplay should turn to The Secret in Their Eyes . I would not be surprised if this book has a whole new life as a text in film courses. And I can’t wait to see what Sacheri will come up with next.

Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations , a story collection, three novels, Boundaries , The Dream Dredger, and Beginning The World Again , and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She can be reached at [email protected].

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Book Review: ‘The Secret in their Eyes’ by Eduardo Sacheri

The Secret in their Eyes , by Eduardo Sacheri, HarperCollins, $29.95

“The book behind the Oscar-winning best foreign film”, says the stamp on the cover. Well, in front of the film actually, but that gold statue clearly woke up the publishers and six years on this terrific crime thriller-cum-love story appears in English for the first time.

On the surface, it’s about a former investigator in the courts of Buenos Aries, haunted by a long-ago case of a beautiful young woman’s rape and murder.

He risked his career — and life — to find the killer and is now writing a book telling the true story.

This all happened in Argentina, during the 1970s, when the courts operated by whim of the military junta.

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The political machinations, and the attempts to block the investigation, provide a rich background to the novel’s broader themes of justice and revenge, plus our detective hero’s attempts to rekindle an unrequited love. It’s a great mixture, the writing strong and simple; I found it gripping.

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This edition is a movie tie-in re-release of the 2011 translation and features artwork on the cover with the faces of Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred in the “Major Motion Picture” based on the novel and released last year. As it turned out, the movie wasn’t so major and disappeared as quickly as breath on a mirror, and this despite the success of the 2009 Argentine movie based on the novel, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film as well as dozens of other international awards. If you have to watch one of these, watch the Argentine production, but a far better choice is to read the novel, which is compelling from beginning to end and far richer in detail.

The protagonist, Benjamin Chaparro, retires from his work in the investigative court and sets out to write a book based on an unsolved case that torments him, the rape and murder of a young wife in her own bedroom. His writing also stirs his memories of his love for Irene Hornos, an intern at the time of the murder but now an important judge. The “Dirty War,” in which the Argentine government practiced vicious political persecutions and “disappeared” at least thirteen thousand people from 1976 to 1983, also becomes part of the story, endangering Chaparro and imbuing a Kafkaesque suspense to everything he does. Ultimately, the question of justice—what it is, who is entitled to it, and to whom it belongs—makes this book much more than an ordinary thriller. 

It isn’t always true that the book is better than the movie (or movies in this case), but it is certainly true of this novel. Sacheri is a masterful storyteller, and the translation never has that slightly-too-careful quality we often find in translated crime novels. This is one of those unusual novels that lifts the simple context of the thriller to the complex emotion and intellect of the best literary novels.

J. Madison Davis University of Oklahoma

Get the book on Amazon or add it to your Goodreads reading list.

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Contigo en la distancia Carla Guelfenbein

Selected Later Poems C. K. Williams

The Perception of Meaning Hisham Bustani. Trans. Thoraya El-Rayyes

Sergio Y Alexandre Vidal Porto. Trans. Alex Ladd

América Latina y la literatura mundial: Mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente Eds. Gesine Müller & Dunia Gras Miravet

God Is Round: Tackling the Giants, Villains, Triumphs, and Scandals of the World’s Favorite Game Juan Villoro. Trans. Thomas Bunstead

A Contrived World Jung Young-Moon. Trans. Jeffrey Karvonen & Mah Eunji

Zodiac Moikom Zeqo. Trans. Anastas Kapurani & Wayne Miller

Einum Froon Akker (pseudonym for Koos Tiemersma)

Remember the Scorpion Isaac Goldemberg. Trans. Jonathan Tittler

Something Will Happen, You’ll See Christos Ikonomou. Trans. Karen Emmerich

Poems from the Río Grande Rudolfo Anaya

The Republics Nathalie Handal

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land Robert Crawford

Oxen Rage Juan Gelman. Trans. Lisa Rose Bradford

The Gun Fuminori Nakamura. Trans. Allison Markin Powell

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The Secret in Their Eyes: A Novel Paperback – October 18, 2011

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• Print length 396 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Other Press
• Publication date October 18, 2011
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.99 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1590514505
• ISBN-13 978-1590514504
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Other Press; unknown edition (October 18, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 396 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590514505
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590514504
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.99 x 8.5 inches
• #2,691 in Political Fiction (Books)
• #4,248 in TV, Movie & Game Tie-In Fiction
• #50,080 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Eduardo sacheri.

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• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 37% 29% 21% 6% 7% 7%

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Customers find the stories compelling, entertaining, and captivating. They also describe the plot as well-put-together and multidimensional. Readers mention the book is deceptively brisk and they love the ending.

"...It is compelling to see Chaparro and some other dedicated assistants and officials attempt to make a difference, to get the world back in balance." Read more

"...into English as "The Secret in Their Eyes," is a deceptively brisk novel : between the short chapters, the larger-than-average font, and the..." Read more

"...I am a big fan of Sacheri's writing. His stories are compelling and entertaining...." Read more

"...The way the characters are drawn is at times witty and Chapparro is very self deprecating . I loved this style...." Read more

Customers find the book great, interesting, and worth their time. They say it keeps their interest from start to finish.

"...34;The Secret in Their Eyes" is a remarkable little piece of work that raises all sorts of worthy questions about love and justice and suffering..." Read more

"...Its marvelous well told ( well translated). It takes you along you could call it a police procedural because there's a lot of police procedure...." Read more

"...It is a compelling read . A refreshing change for today's murder mysteries, with minimal violence, sex and body parts...." Read more

"The book was ok , but the movie, based upon the book, was far more enjoyable...." Read more

Customers find the writing style interesting and different. They say the narrating is beguiling and the story is amazing. Readers also appreciate the details enough to allow them to visualize.

"...twice: once quickly for the story, and once slowly to savor the beautiful prose and haunting characters and inevitable unfolding of events." Read more

"...His writing style is creative , often employing colloquialisms like 'fúlbol' in place of 'fútbol'...." Read more

"This is a difficult read in that I (and my spouse) had to go back to earlier chapters to refresh on who was who, who did what-ie, re-read parts..." Read more

Customers find the characters well-developed and haunting. They also appreciate the descriptive writing, saying they can visualize the characters and locations.

"...for the story, and once slowly to savor the beautiful prose and haunting characters and inevitable unfolding of events." Read more

"...The way the characters are drawn is at times witty and Chapparro is very self deprecating. I loved this style...." Read more

"...Good descriptive writing where I could envision the characters and locations . Soulful." Read more

"...The characters are well developed and there is an interesting twist to the story." Read more

Customers find the book interesting. They say it keeps them involved and hooked until the end.

"...sadness that permeates the story, the author manages to keep the interest level high ...." Read more

"Really enjoyed this book. Kept me turning the page . Good descriptive writing where I could envision the characters and locations. Soulful." Read more

"...This novel kept me so involved that I couldn't put it down nor stop thinking about it when the story ended." Read more

"This was very unusual and hooked me until the end ." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book slow.

"worst book I have read in many, many years. It is so slow ; the author is writing two books about the same subject from different views...." Read more

"I thought this was a good book. It started off a little slow , but as I read on it got more interesting. By the end of it I was hooked." Read more

"A really good book. Starts off kinda slow but then picks up at the end. Hope the movie is just as good?!" Read more

"I like the book very much despite its very slow start " Read more

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