Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable mystery
Review: This was a wonderful story. I have not really listened to many audiobooks but I found myself just as immersed as I would have if I had been reading the book. The characters were fascinating, especially Father Quart. I am very much looking forward to other books (or audios) by Perez-Reverte!
Rating: 
Summary: Terrible characterisation
Review: What a disappointment. Most of the main characters, aside from Priamo and the investigator, are entirely one dimensional and give you the sense of an author who filled out a character development worksheet (ok, this character wears silver bracelets, crochets a blanket for her long-gone trosseau, and has a spit curl) and then plugs in the appropriate details by formula over and over again. I finished the book and could list only two or three superficial details I knew about all three of the co-conspirators, the duchess, the banker, etc. The first few chapters were interesting but the promise quickly dissipated, to the point where I was skipping who paragraphs in the last chapter in an attempt to just finish the thing. NOT what you'd expect a reader to do in a suspense novel, but Arturo Perez-Reverte just doesn't make you care.I give it a two rather than a one star rating only because the character of Father Priamo is relatively well drawn and interesting. But it's hard to hold a book just on the basis of one character. This reads like the work of a mediocre college student.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: When an ingenious hacker infiltrates the Vatican's computer system and leaves a message on the Pope's desktop imploring the Vatican to save the soon-to-be demolished Our Lady of the Tears church in Seville, the Vatican deploys its version of a special operations expert in the formidable personage of Fr. Lorenzo Quart. Quart is handsome, rugged and epitomizes the business end of the Vatican while promoting a no-nonsense vision of the Church in Rome that exactly opposes the cozy sanctuary feel of Our Lady of the Tears. The congregation of the old and crumbling church believe that the building itself has an uncanny sense of survival; two murders or accidents have already taken place; the victims, people involved in the church's scheduled demolition. World-toughened Quart believes no such thing, he attributes the church's strange staying power to its motley crew of supporters: an old renegade pastor, his young computer-savy associate, a art-restoring nun from California, a willful yet beautiful aristocrat and her old-fashioned mother with a fetish for Coca Cola. The opposition is just as real--a jilted banker amd his hilarious stoogelike henchmen who envision a more self-serving and lucrative edifice on the Our Lady of Tears property.
The plot however is secondary in this most wonderful of character studies. As Quart discovers the different truths that center around the old church, he ekes out the meaning that the Church has not only for its individual protectors, but also for himself. Like any truely good piece of literature the main character undergoes some metamorphosis; Quart's is profound and well worth the read through the stirring backdrop of beautiful Seville.
Unlike some of the other reviewers, I find the "Seville Communion" incompariable when looked at in the same context as "The Flanders Panel" and "Club Dumas". While I liked these other novels, I was moved by the Seville Communion and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys their characters made of flesh and blood, not just stereotypical ideals.
| 
