The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano

ISBN: 9780330523059

Picador, 2009

Paperback, 182 Pages

This is a spellbinding, sui generis, detective fiction focusing on the swirling vortex of sex, death, and intrigue surrounding a beautiful Spanish figure skating champion. Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, "The Skating Rink" is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of town. What he doesn't tell her is that he paid for it using embezzled public funds; but such a betrayal is only the beginning and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene...Told in short suspenseful chapters by three alternating male narrators - a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered, yet still romantic, itinerant poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur - "The Skating Rink" is a wholly engrossing tale of murder and its motives.