This is the first of Jason Webster’s stories about Spanish detective Max Cámara. The setting is Valencia during Fallas, the five-day festival of fireworks and bonfires.

A bullfighter is murdered, a controversial bullfighter, in a city undergoing local elections and with a strong anti-taurino lobby. Webster has chosen his setting well, Valencia is a noisy, shouting, breathing presence on every page. The bullfighting is strange, a world of customs and special language, its symbolism machismo. Into the middle of all this walks the Fallas-hating, bullfight-disapproving detective who’s having a difficult time with his girlfriend. And he’s being reviewed at work for his behaviour in a previous case.

Is there one killer or two, and what about the dead bullfighter’s artist boyfriend and his very-public fiancé? Webster [above] keeps the page turning with ease.

To learn more about Jason Webster’s fiction and non-fiction books, visit his website here.
To take a video tour of Jason Webster’s Valencia, click here.
To read my review of Blood Red, the fourth in the Max Cámara series, click here.
Reviews of the second and third books in the Max Cámara series are coming soon.
‘Or the Bull Kills You’ by Jason Webster