So to Andalucia for The Ignorance Of Blood, Robert Wilson’s fourth book to feature Sevillano homicide detective, Javier Falcon. Over the course of three previous novels Falcon has emerged as a fantastically appealing character and these are complex, resonant and thoroughly enjoyable crime novels of the highest order.

Wilson’s Seville is a vibrant place on the far edge of the new Europe being flooded with new money, some legitimate but much of it inevitably criminal. This is a city at once beautiful, ancient and ordered to its own rhythm but also changing fast on the secret proceeds of drugs, prostitution and corruption. Not to mention it is a city facing new threats from fanatical Islamic terrorists and from an influx of super violent, nihilistic Russian mafiosi.

In this Seville everybody and everything is somehow connected, somehow intertwined with something else. Corruption and criminal commerce play out against the heady, sweltering backdrop of Sevillano life and Wilson does a great job balancing the yin and the yang of this unlikely Wild West frontier town. In his hands Seville is revealed as a perfect setting for a series of modern crime novels and with Javier Falcon Wilson has drawn a character strong enough to put into this world.

Driven to a nervous breakdown by events in The Blind Man of Seville, Falcon has spent the rest of the series recovering the threads of his sanity and his personal life, while uncovering murder and mayhem in his home city. Falcon is no superman. He is part of the bureaucratic machine, he suffers from stress and the aftermath of a painful divorce but, as the times require, he is also dogged, professional and incorruptible. So far Falcon has been divorced, sidelined at work, uncovered paedophile rings, institutional corruption and the revelation that his father, an internationally renowned artist, was not only not his father but a fraud and the centre of a life built on a tissue of lies. As the whole thing moves forward so Falcon’s backstory moves in and out of focus according to the rhythms of Wilson’s complex plotting. This is great stuff.

At the beginning of The Ignorance of Blood a car crashes on a motorway killing a Russian mafiosi on his way to defecting to a rival group having just stolen 8m Euros and some compromising DVDs. So begins a violent turf war to control prostitution, protection, gambling and drug supply on the Spanish Costas. When it becomes clear the Russians are also muscling in on the region’s construction, the tendrils appear to reach far into the upper echelons of public office. Could there even be a connection to terrorist atrocities in Wilson’s previous Javier Falcon novel, The Hidden Assassins? Only Falcon thinks the violence is linked but is he prepared for the appalling consequences of pursuing these links?

As in The Hidden Assassins, Falcon finds himself increasingly drawn into a world of espionage and subterfuge as Andalucia finds itself on the terrorist frontline. At which point The Ignorance of Blood becomes two intertwined novels – a trick Wilson has pulled off before, most notably in his masterful novel set in both wartime and present day Portugal, A Small Death in Lisbon. There are depths and complexities to Wilson’s work that are not often seen outside the very best crime fiction.

If I am being excessively harsh I would say the final quarter sees Wilson in a bit of a rush to get to the end making the pace feel a tad forced. However when the stars align as well as they do here it is a churlish complaint. The Ignorance of Blood, along with its predecessors, The Blind Man of Seville, The Silent and The Damned and The Hidden Assasins, is top rated crime fiction and the whole Javier Falcon series is highly recommended.

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