![]() A "symbol of pacification" since the president proclaimed victory over the guerrillas, it nonetheless remains in a "red zone" where laws are suspended. The setting is Holy Week in Ayacucho, in the year 2000, as presidential elections loom and tourists descend on the Andean town. Yet this novel of the post-boom generation also reveals how insidiously the investigator from Lima becomes part of the problem, as the moral line dissolves between terrorist and counter-terrorist. And like Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes, it uses the crime thriller genre – notably the spectre of the serial killer – to riveting effect. ![]() Santiago Roncagliolo's Red April returns to the aftermath of that guerrilla war and counter-insurgency of the 1980s and 90s, when 70,000 people were killed. M ario Vargas Llosa's most despairing novel is a whodunit set amid the blood-steeped Maoist insurgency of Peru's Shining Path. ![]()
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