Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass - Spain

My choice this week for the meme Crime Fiction on a Euro Pass are three historical mysteries by Spanish writer Arturo Reverte-Perez that I read some years back. All three books were a hit with our reading group.


THE NAUTICAL CHART

Tánger uses her considerable skills with men and her expertise with atlases and nautical maps to search for the ship's rumored lost treasure. Coy is quickly drawn into the search, and finds himself falling in love as they seek their fortune together. Or do they?

Their journey becomes dangerous. Does the treasure really exist? Are there secrets dwelling in the depths of the sea? And what of the depths of the heart?

THE FLANDERS PANEL

The clue to a murder in the art world of contemporary Madrid lies hidden in a medieval painting of a game of chess. In the 15th-century Flemish painting two noblemen are playing chess. Yet two years before he could sit for the portrait, one of them was murdered. Now, in a 20th-century Madrid, Julia, a picture restorer preparing the painting for auction, uncovers and inscription that points to the crime: Quis necavit equitem? Who killed the knight? But as she teams up with a brillian chess theoretician to retrace the moves, she discovers the deadly game is not yet over. 

In the painting, the Duke of Flanders and his knight are locked in a game of chess, and a dark lady lurks mysteriously in the background. Julia is determined to solve the five-hundred-year-old murder, but as she begins to look for clues, several of her friends in the art world are brutally murdered in quick succession. Messages left with the bodies suggest a crucial connection between the chess game in the painting, the knight's murder, the sordid underside of the contemporary art world, and the latest deaths. Just when all of the players in the mystery seem to be pawns themselves, events race toward a shocking conclusion.

THE FENCING MASTER

On the eve of the Revolution of 1868, old-fashioned gentleman and master of fencing, Jaime Astarloa, is above the rumours of political exploit and the Queen's love life.

One day he is approached by a mysterious woman who seeks to learn the secret of "the unstoppable thrust," a supreme moment at the very heart of the art of fencing. All too soon he finds himself in the vortex of a plot that includes seduction, secret political documents, and more than one murder.

List (courtesy Fantastic Fiction)
The Dumas Club (1993)
The Flanders Panel (1994)
The Seville Communion (1998)
The Fencing Master (1999)
The Nautical Chart: A Novel of Adventure (2001)
The Queen of the South (2004)
The Painter of Battles (2007)