Purity of Blood - Dark Publications

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Product Description
Arturo Perez-Reverte is one of the most beloved writers in the world. His bestselling novels, including The Club Dumas and The Queen of the South, have been published in fifty countries and translated into twenty-eight languages. Now, with The Adventures of Captain Alatriste, he delivers a magnificent series, already a million-copy bestseller in Spain, that chronicles the heroic adventures of a seventeenth-century swordsman.

In Purity of Blood, the second novel in the series, the courageous Alatriste is considering rejoining his old regiment to fight in Breda-but his blade leads him to another adventure. A desperate father hires him to rescue his daughter from a convent where a powerful priest is said to be using the girl as his personal concubine. The father has been prevented from legal recourse because the priest has threatened to reveal that the man's family is "not of pure blood"-is, in fact, of Jewish descent -which will all but destroy the family name. Alatriste agrees to help, and several nights later, under the cloak of darkness, a rescue attempt is made.

But soon Alatriste discovers that he has become part of a religious and political conspiracy that leads all the way to the highest levels of the Inquisition. When a date is set to burn the man's daughter at the stake, Captain Alatriste springs into action -sword first-setting off a series of twists and turns that will keep readers riveted to the page.

Translation by Margaret Sayers Peden

Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

A knight without armor in a savage land January 20, 2006
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

4 and 1/2 stars.

"Purity of Blood" is Arturo Perez-Reverte's exciting sequel to "Captain Alatriste". Written in the swashbuckling style of Dumas and set in early 17th-century Madrid, "Captain Alatriste" introduced us to the hero of Captain Diego Alatriste. Diego is newly returned from Spain's war in Flanders and ready to hire himself out as a bodyguard and general sword-for-hire.

"Purity of Blood" finds Diego on a new adventure. His friend, Don Francisco de Quevado, introduces Diego to an aging father who seeks to rescue his daughter from a convent. The convent is not a place of worship but, rather a place of obscene debauchery overseen by an aristocratic priest with connections at the court of King Phillip IV. The father's attempt to seek the release of his daughter is met with a threat to reveal the family as `conversos' (Catholics who have Jewish blood). Exposure as a converse is a powerful threat in a country in which the forces of the inquisition can imprison torture and burn conversos at the stake.

The story is narrated by Inigo Balboa, Alatriste's young page, in the manner of Dr. Watson's memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. As with any Holmes story, the game is quickly afoot and Alatriste launches a rescue attempt. Alatriste quickly discovers that the best laid plans of mice and swordsmen-for-hire can be beset with complications. Antagonists from his first adventure, particularly the Italian assassin Gualterio Malatesta, return to seek revenge both on Alatriste and Balboa for their actions in "Captain Alatriste".

Perez-Reverte does an excellent job moving the story along. As one might expect in a series, the character of Alatriste and the other recurring players introduced in Captain Alatriste are fleshed out. Although there is plenty of action in Purity of Blood Perez-Reverte provides a great deal of period detail about Spain, the inquisition, and daily life in the sometimes sordid and dangerous streets of 17th-century Madrid. Balboa's reflections on Spain's social structure, the vagaries of the reign of Phillip IV, and his discourse on the beginning of Spain's fall from an imperial world power of the first rank to that of a nation marked by dissolution and decay are both entertaining and informative.

Purity of Blood is an excellent story and well worth reading. However, because this is a sequel, and because many of the characters and the relationship among those characters is formed in "Captain Alatriste" I think it advisable for the reader to start with the first book, which has recently been issued in paperback. Both books are well worth reading and Purity of Blood has recently been released in paperback.

Purity of Blood is well worth reading.
L. Fleisig

4 out of 5 stars

Perez Reverte is Good but No Alexandre Dumas January 25, 2006
19 out of 26 found this review helpful

The War in the Flanders are about to resume and the old soldiers are returning to their Tercios. Sword for hire, Diego Alatriste is persuaded by a friend to do one last job, help a family rescue a daughter being held against her will in a convent. Thus begins the second installment in Arturo Perez Reverte's Captain Alatriste series.

There must be some deep set human need for tales of sword play and adventure. This genre of story has produced some great authors including my favorites the immotral Alexandre Dumas, Emilio Salgari and Rafael Sabatini. In the last few decades this classic genre has been subsumed by the Fantasy genre with its love of sword and sorcery tales. So it is a pleasure to see a major contemporary writer mine the past to create a new series of swashbuckling novels.

Perez Reverte is a talented writer and his inclusion of details from Spain's Golden Age give this novel an historical richness absent from most swashbuckling tales. My only complaint with the series is that each of the books is short and more properly should be called a novela. Perez Reverte's focus is on action and not on the development of character.

This is a wonderful genre of fiction and people new to it should start with the classics like the "Three Musketeers", "Scaramouche" and the "The Scarlet Pimpernel". Perez Reverte's Alatriste novels are good and the reader will not be disapointed but honestly his novels fair less well when compared to Alexandre Dumas' "Three Musketeers", "Twenty Years After" or "Man in the Iron Mask". Dumas wrote novels and Perez Reverte writes stories.

2 out of 5 stars

more 'history' than story in this historical novel February 15, 2006
9 out of 11 found this review helpful

Arturo Perez-Reverte's "Purity of Blood" is second in the Captain Alatriste series of historical adventure novels, currently a 5-volume series of books which began publication in Spain in the mid 1990s. The books follow the adventures of Captain Alatriste and his adolescent protege Inigo Balboa as they swashbuckler their way through 17th-century Spain. The Alatriste books are obviously aimed closer to the commercial market than much of Perez-Reverte's other work, evoking associations as they do with "The Three Musketeers" or Johnston McCulley's Zorro stories. "Purity of Blood" is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. During one of Alatriste's adventures, he and his companions fall into a trap and young Inigo--framed as a "Judaizer"--falls afoul of the Inquisition.

The book does have its good moments, such as the scene in which Alatriste, trying to find some way to rescue Inigo, confronts a most powerful politician, a bureaucrat at first disinclined to give them any aid. Pushed to desperation, Alatriste, usually a quiet, stoic man, delivers a monologue in which we see the undeniable potency of melodrama:

"'Excellency. I have nothing but the sword I live by and my record of service, which means nothing to anyone.' The captain spoke very slowly, as if thinking aloud more than addressing the first minister of two worlds. 'Neither am I a man of many words or resources. But they are going to burn an innocent lad whose father, my comrade, died fighting in those wars that are as much the king's as they are yours. Perhaps I, and Lope Balboa, and Balboa's son, do not tip the scale that Your Excellency so rightly mentioned. Yet one never knows what twists and turns life will take, nor whether one day the full reach of a good blade will not be more beneficial than all the papers and all the notaries and all the royal seals in the world. If you help the orphan of one of your soldiers, I give you my word that on such a day you can count on me.'"

Unfortunately, the elements of plot and character in "Purity of Blood" take a seat at the far back of this bus, a bus clearly driven by the story's mise-en-scene. Essentially, the novel is all about its historical milieu--an excuse for the author to recreate the Spanish Inquisition and emphasize the gross anti-Semitism of the era. Thus, the novel comes off sounding more like an anthropology experiment, a modernist morality tale. And the story's meager adventuring suffers for this. The trouble here is very well demonstrated in a line of narrative late in the novel, a line that illuminates Perez-Reverte's racial guilt and his gaudy, off-putting, public self-flagellation: "It seemed that to be lucid and Spanish would forever be coupled with great bitterness and little hope."

5 out of 5 stars

wonderful seventeenth century sword-buckler thriller January 5, 2006
7 out of 10 found this review helpful

In 1623 Madrid Chief Constable Martin Saldana arrives at the crime scene of a strangled woman sitting in a sedan chair in front of the church; she holds a pouch containing fifty escudos and a handwritten note stating: "For masses for her soul". He confides to his friend Captain Diego Alatriste that he is unable to resolve who murdered the woman and what motive caused the homicide.

Don Francisco de Quevedo asks Alatriste to help him before the soldier returns to his hometown of Breda, Flanders where hostilities have once again broken out. Francisco's daughter Elvira is being held at La Adoracian, a convent that is a harem for the dangerous Father Juan Coroado. The duenna who brought Elvira and two other novices there simply vanished. Adding to Francisco's fears is that he and his daughter are not "not of pure blood", which makes them fodder for the Inquisition fire. Alatriste accepts the assignment as he is not one to idly stand for the abuse of power, but soon connects Coroado's concubine center to the plaza homicide with both linked to the Inquisition.

The sequel to the wonderful seventeenth century sword-buckling CAPTAIN ALATRISTE, is a terrific action-packed tale that starts off with the plaza homicide and never slows down until the final confrontation. Besides the heroic escapades of the lead protagonist, who has some set backs during his rescue attempts, readers obtain an in depth look at Inquisition Spain, but the historical tidbits are cleverly interwoven into the fabric of the adventures. Once again Arturo Perez-Reverte provides a fabsulous fast-paced thriller starring a wonderful super soldier who delays his entry to the war flaring up back home to risk his life trying to rescue a damsel in distress.

Harriet Klausner

4 out of 5 stars

Better in Spanish January 12, 2006
5 out of 8 found this review helpful

Just got this edition in English yesterday.
This actually is my favorite story in the series so far, although apparently it won't be covered in the movie coming out later this year -- it's a side trip from the bigger narrative of Alatriste's life, so I can see why scriptwriters trying to get a story down to two hours might skip it. That said, this novel has illuminating insights into Inigo and Angelica and the chemistry between them, and Caridad la Lebrijana (who's a favorite of mine and won't be in the film either!) has a wonderful scene in it; not to mention the chilling sections about what it's like to hang out in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Oh, and I enjoyed both brothers of the de la Cruz family for different reasons, in their bit parts. A P-R has a great gift for foreshadowing, and winking to the reader, who is often smarter than the protagonists themselves -- having the benefit of a few extra centuries of elapsed history: I stopped breathing when I turned the page and saw what the Interesting Inscription on Angelica's pendant looked like. Poor Inigo, you have no idea. . .
It really is better in Spanish though. No insult intended to the translator, who has done a wonderful job; but that's the way it is.

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