El caballero y la muerte

The protagonist of this brilliant detective novel, Vice (so nicknamed because of his position as deputy police commissioner), is a peculiar man: skeptical, riddled with cancer but a chain smoker, he has Dürer's original engraving The Knight, the death and the devil Vice investigates the murder of a powerful lawyer and politician, a crime apparently committed by terrorists calling themselves "the Sons of '89," after the French Revolution. And while the deputy commissioner delves into the ins and outs of the case, this agile and sarcastic detective fiction becomes -as occurs in most of Leonardo Sciascia's works- a bitter and lucid reflection on the disconcerting truth of the world in which we live, a world of which "the devil was so tired that he preferred to leave everything in the hands of men, more efficient than him".