Death of a Nationalist ANNOTATION
Winner of the 2004 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Madrid, 1938. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon is a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, a rank rare for a man not yet thirty, but Tejada is an unusual recruit. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has interrupted his legal studies in Salamanca. Second son of a conservative southern family of andowners, he is an enthusiast for the Catholic Franquista cause, a dedicated, and now triumphant, Nationalist.
This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while Communists have come to the aid of the Republicans. Atrocities have devastated both sides. It is at this moment, when the Republicans have surrendered, and the Guardia Civil has begun to impose order in the ruins of Madrid, that Tejada finds the body of his best friend, a hero of the siege of Toledo, shot to death on a street named Amor de Dios. Naturally, a Red is suspected. And it is easy for Tejada to assume that the woman wearing a red scarf, caught kneeling over the body, is the killer. But when his doubts are aroused, he cannot help seeking justice.
Author Biography: Rebecca Pawel is twenty-five years old. She lives in New York City and teaches Spanish in a Brooklyn high school.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War provides the bleak setting for Pawel's stirring first novel. Madrid in 1939 is filled with bomb craters, desecrated churches and nearly abandoned streets, while black markets are just about the only markets with anything to sell. The hatreds and atrocities shared by the Nationalists (supported by the fascists) and the Republicans (supported by the Communists) still simmer and erupt in sporadic violence. The Guardia Civil has the responsibility to maintain authority-and their enthusiasm and ruthlessness for enforcing order terrorizes the citizens. The intertwined fates of Sergeant Tejada Alonzo y Leon of the Guardia Civil and that of Gonzalo Llorente, a wounded Republican in hiding, are handled with unusual skill and subtlety. When Tejada arrives at the scene where a murdered comrade lies, he leaps to a conclusion about the killer's identity. He must follow a tortuous path to find the real killer and, ultimately, redemption. Gonzalo has lost his love as well as his hope for any kind of future. His one aim is for a small measure of vengeance before he dies. Pawel is unsparing in her depiction of the casual brutalities spawned by the war, but also offers evidence of the power of little civilities and kindnesses in a novel that easily transcends the formulaic crime story. (Feb.) Forecast: As genre entertainment this will be a hard sell, but it should get some serious literary attention for its 25-year-old author, who teaches Spanish in a Brooklyn high school.
Kirkus Reviews
Newcomer Pawel, a young Brooklyn high-school teacher, turns the clock back to 1939 and Madrid's tumultuous past. The Nationalists, on the winning side of the Civil War, are determined to restore order by viciously eliminating remnants of the Communist-backed Republican cause. When Carlos Tejada Alonso y Lﾽon, a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, recognizes his compadre in the siege of Toledo, Paco Lopez, as the corpse lying dead in the street, he is so incensed that he immediately executes the woman bending over to retrieve a notebook, assuming that she has killed Lopez. Determined to find out what was so important about the notebook, Tejada begins a search for its owner. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Llorente is released from the hospital to learn that his lover Viviana has been murdered. Despite his lack of identity papers and his urgent need to hide from the Falangists, he is determined to find the Guardia officer who killed her. The two men are now on a collision course that wends past black marketeers and a mysterious woman named Isabel before the whole truth about Paco's death is revealed. An intriguing juxtaposition of the political and the personal. Warning: The fainthearted may gasp at Tejada's casual cruelty, which is somewhat at odds with the denouement.
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