Southwesterly Wind

Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza. Henry Holt & Company, $22 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-6891-7

The weather, perhaps a stand-in for fate, has a hand in the tentative outcome of Southwesterly Wind: An Inspector Espinosa Mystery, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's third psychologically acute crime novel (after 2003's December Heat), translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. A troubled young man, Gabriel, comes to the skeptical Espinosa for help because a psychic predicted he'd kill someone before his next birthday. The Rio de Janeiro cop has to take the claim more seriously when two murders linked to Gabriel occur close to the predicted date.

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