A chunky thriller set picturesquely amid the corridas and corruption of Holy Week in Andalucia, Semana Santa is steeped in Spanish Civil Ward politics yet curiously un Spanish the cops at the centre of the story wise talk as if they had come straight out of Ed McBain, while the robbers are stereotypes of a suspiciously Anglo Saxon variety.
The heroine meanwhile, with her academic background and poetic excursions into intuitive nightmare, seems to have wandered in from somewhere else altogether. It is to David Hewson's credit that he manages to spin an absorbing, if over long, yarn out of it all.
