Black Sun Rising

By: Matthew Carr

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Barcelona, summer 1909. When the scientist and explorer Randolph Foulkes is blown up in a random terrorist bomb attack, Private Detective Harry Lawton is hired by the man's widow to identify the beneficiary of a large payment Foulkes had made shortly before his death. Lawton's arrival in the Catalan capital coincides with a series of unusual killings that appear to have been carried out by a blood-drinking animal in the Ramblas district and adds another element of instability to a city already teetering on the brink of insurrection. Lawton soon meets and teams up with Esperanza Claramunt, a young anarchist whose lover was one of the victims of the "beast of the Ramblas", and the Catalan crime reporter Bernat Mata, who has begun investigating these crimes.

So what begins as a straightforward investigation into presumed marital infidelity turns into something far more sinister, as Lawton probes Foulkes' connections to the mysterious Explorers Club, the Barcelona political police, and an eccentric Austrian hypnotist. Adrift in a city gripped by rebellion and lawlessness, Lawton enters a labyrinth of murder, corruption, political conflict, and crazed racial pseudoscience where no one's survival is guaranteed.

©2020 Matthew Carr (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Gore + Description = Boring

I generally love historical fiction/mystery. This offering, however, never gelled. The narrator has a low, sonorous (dare I say almost soporific) voice; and in places which demanded a clear pause (i.e., when in book-form there is probably an extra space or a row of asterisks indicating a change in venue or character-focus), he kept right on with his careful enunciation but little emotion. Perhaps that lack of emotion was needed for the increasing levels of thriller/horror materials in the later chapters (not a book for those leery of blood, needles, or vampirish suggestions). Some descriptions of a place as lovely as Barcelona can set a mood, but this author seems to have written whole pages with a map of Barcelona in front of him, to document some sort of historicity. One of my most disappointing listens.