Rating: 
Summary: Great book, suffers a bit in translation...
Review: Reverte continues his wonderful series of eclectic mysteries, moving the genre into teritories rarely trod upon. Here Father Quart, sort of a James Bond type for the Vatican, is dispatched to investigate a series of computer break-ins by a hacker from Seville. The plot is solid and intriguing, the mystery held (literally) until the last sentence. My only complaint is that, not being Spanish, the character's names seemed confusingly similar to me. Also the Femme Fatale being name Macarena brought back memories of that annoying dance... Still, Highly Recommended. Father Quart is one of the most intriguing new characters I've found in years.
Rating: 
Summary: great book!
Review: The main character of this book is a catholic priest/spy for the vatican. Set in Seville, he is to discover who is sending messages to the pope via the Web regarding a church to be demolished and some unfortunate characters caught in the middle of it. The plot is rich, the character development is excellent. This is one of the best books so far this year. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: I can only hope this book was better in the original Spanish
Review: I must have missed something that others got from this book. I found this book BORING! The characters, especially the comic relief trio, were incredibly inane. It was obvious who was the killer and the hacker about 25 pages into the book. I am sorry that I wasted electricity powering a light to read this book by. Upon finishing this book I quite cheerfully hurled it into the garbage.
Rating:
Summary: A great idea, a great background, a good story, an ok book
Review: Intrigue in the Vatican. A priest goes to Seville, Spain and gets caught up in the beauty of its culture and its women. This could be a true story. Except, the book spends a little too much time on details and not enough on suspense and plot. This book will not keep you awake late at night, it won't put you to sleep on sleepless nights either, though. It's a good book, a solid suspense novel, but it must have lost something of its extraordinary in the translation. I recommend you read the book, but skip the boring parts. It gets a 7 for orginiality, scenery and idea.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I read the Spanish version and it was great. Anybody who thinks that this book is "silly" or not "intellectual", has not a clue of the life at the end of the 20th century. This is a story about lonely fighters who still fight, without caring about their world falling apart.
Rating:
Summary: A good intrigue but not as good as the Flanders panels...
Review: It is a modern detective novel which keeps the suspense until the very last page. The action is in Sevilla and more particularly in a special area of the city. Lorenzo Quart, the priest, gives a new face to the catholic church.
I did enjoy particularly the passage when the three guys led by an old Cuban fanatic fight in a boat. It is funny to see how Perez Reverte criticises the world of Spanish business through the characters.Read it youll have a great moment !
Rating:
Summary: A Very Nice Thriller
Review: I read the Spanish version and it was very good. I still think his best book is either the Fencing Master or Club Dumas. However, this one is a close second. An unforgetable cast and an impressive background make this a very entertaining read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good.
Review: I read this book in Spanish, after reading both Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas. Stated in the abstract, the plot is quite promising: a hacker breaks into the Pope's personal computer to alert him to the fact that an old church in Seville is quite literally killing people. A special vatican investigator -- James Bond in a priestly collar -- is duly dispatched to look into the matter. At an operational level, however, the book tends to fizzle. For starters, the plot is not as accesible to those who are not familiar with Spanish folklore -- particularly a type of musical entertainment (copla) that has not been in vogue even in Spain for several decades. Some aspects of the book strike the reader as a takeoff on Morris West (a lot of detail on the internal workings of the Vatican) -- but if you like that sort of writing you are better off with The Shoes of the Fisherman or The Devil's Advocate. While the book is well written, and while it can by and large hold the reader's attention, it is not really a "mystery" and is unlikely to satisfy those who are seeking more page-turning plots in the tradition of The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas
Rating:
Summary: Even his worst works are better that others bests
Review: In my opinion The Seville Communion (La piel del tambor) is the worst of Perez-Reverte novels. Nevertheless it deserves 4 stars because Mr. Arturo is playing in a different league and even his failures contain countless moments of magic.
The main handicap of the novel is his main character, Father Quart. The super-attactive, strong, charming priest working for a kind of Vatican Secret Service lacks credibility and his romance with the aristocratic lady is somehow predictable (remember the atractive symbology professor of The Da Vinci Code? It is the same kind of dull character).
So, how can a novel stand the weakness of the main character? Response: thanks to a fantastic pleiade of secondary characters: The three villians are simply wonderful, the old priest is touching, the banker is charming.
And then you have some pearls of Reverte's mythology, this peculiar mixture of History and adventure (better, this underlining of the adventures that History hides): pirates in the Cuban War, haunted barroque churches... this is the Perez-Reverte we love and this is what he is good at: treasures, war, puzzles and riddles. Reverte, leave the religious-love stories for those that lack your talent to tell a tale. The descriptions of Seville, its magic and charm, are also a good element of the book
In any case, it would be worth to read this novel if only for two magic moments: the conversation of the two priests about Astronomy and the hilarious moment were the vilians are "set on fire".
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: Ostensibly, this is the story of a hacker breaking into the Vatican computer system and appealing to the Pope to save a small, neighbourhood church in Seville from being shut down. Father Lorenzo Quart is sent by the Vatican to Seville to uncover just who this hacker, who goes by the code name Vespers, really is.But really, the mystery is incidental. For me, the book's raison d'etre wasn't really to discover who Vespers was, but to present the reader with vividly drawn characters and situations. The scenes that portrayed the slowly unfolding relationship between Quart and Maccarena, or the funny-sad trio of would-be criminals, or Don Priamo, the aged priest who would sacrifice all for his simple faith were what kept me reading. I will definitely read more by Perez-Reverte.
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