Inspector Espinosa Books In Order

Publication Order of Delegado Espinosa Books

Inspector Espinosa is the protagonist of a series of crime fiction novels written by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. The books take place in Rio de Janeiro.

+The Story

Inspector Espinosa is an ordinary police officer operating out of Rio de Janeiro. Introduced to readers in ‘The Silence of the Rain’, the detective is tasked with making sense of the death of Ricardo Carvalho.

Ricardo was a wealthy executive with a beautiful wife and everything to live for. And yet evidence points to the fact that the man shot himself dead after taking a few drags of his cigarette. What could have pushed him to take his life?

That is the question Inspector Espinosa must answer. He undertakes his task with fervor, sassing out clues, talking to the people in Ricardo’s life and hunting for potential witnesses.

In between all the hands-on aspects of the case, Espinosa simply walks the length of Rio de Janeiro, talking to himself and trying to make sense of all the clues even as he enjoys the sights and sounds of the city.

The inspector Espinosa series began publication in 1996. At the time, it was pretty rare to find crime fiction novels with South American detectives on the shelves of bookstores. That did not change as the 2000s came and went. In fact, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s work only seems to grow in strength, with inspector Espinosa filling a gap in the crime fiction genre that has been ignored.

The various installments in the Inspector Espinosa series can be read on their own. It helps to know where the detective came from and what drives him to act as he does. But for the most part, each novel focuses on its own plots, mysteries, and crimes and, thus, can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of its predecessors.

The structure of the novels doesn’t differ that drastically from the average series in the crime fiction genre. Each new book begins with the commitment of a murder after which Inspector Espinosa is called upon to make sense of matters.

The series has been praised for its noir aspect. While a considerable portion of the books is written in the third person, Espinosa’s own journey is explored from the first person perspective.

Roza takes readers right into the detective’s brain and allows them to follow every single step he takes and train of thought he has regarding his investigation. In fact, the average Inspector Espinosa novel is spent primarily inside the detective’s introspection as he explains the facts as readers know them; reveals what he has learned and then mules over the clues that he discovers in each new chapter.

The detective is wrong more often than he is correct, at least for the majority of each novel; though he eventually winds his way back to the truth. Even though these novels are categorized as crime and mystery, the author doesn’t worry too much about making certain that they fit that particular mold.

While every novel has a central mystery, that mystery is hardly the primary focus of the Espinosa books. Rather, the author is more interested in exploring the people behind the mysteries.

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza wants his readers to understand why the perpetrators of the crimes in his novels made the decisions they made. That might explain why some of the novels in the Inspector Espinosa series tend to deliver finales that audiences find dissatisfying.

Roza has a tendency to leave many of the plot threads introduced in any given novel unsolved. The author contends that the real world does not always provide answers for every occurrence. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to simply catch the killer.

You might never know who helped him commit the murder or which parties were working so hard to debilitate Espinosa’s investigation. Roza has explained in his interviews that answering all the tiny details of any given mystery is the job of Inspector Espinosa.

And the author expects his audience to imagine that Espinosa eventually resolves every plot thread. However, as an author, Roza isn’t as interested in the crimes themselves as he is in the people behind the crimes. And his books generally mirror that mindset.

Roza believes that his books draw attention because his hero is such an ordinary man. Espinosa is no superhero. He isn’t any more charismatic than the average man and you won’t find him charming any pretty women into his bed.

Inspector Espinosa is a public employee and that is all there is to him. He just so happens to have a critical mind that allows him to dissect clues and crimes.

+The Author

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza is a Brazilian author that was born in 1936. Roza was a professor who specialized in psychology and philosophy. He even wrote academic texts on the subjects.

The author was 59 when he finally decided to write fiction. And it didn’t take him long to garner success, with Roza eventually winning a few literary accolades of note and finally finding the courage to quit his job in 1998.

The author has found that because he entered the publishing game so late, he tends to approach his writing with far more urgency, primarily because he doesn’t know how many more years he has left ahead of him. The author worries that he might lose his mental agility before he can tell all the stories in his head.

+The Silence of the Rain

Ricardo Carvalho had everything a man could want. He was young, married to a beautiful woman and an executive with more money than he knew what to do with. So it made no sense when he smoked a cigarette, got into his car and killed himself.

Inspector Espinosa is called upon to make sense of the situation. The crime scene looks like a robbery that went wrong but a lot of things are not adding up.

+Southwesterly Wind

Espinosa is the Chief of the Copacabana precinct and he is more than happy to abandon his paperwork when a case falls across his desk. A young man comes in claiming that a psychic predicted that he would murder someone. And now that young man is pretty sure the prediction is about to come true.