Brazilian noir

PatrĂcia Melo took the title of her recent book The Body Snatcher from Robert Louis Stevenson, but the plot is more like Jim Thompson. It sounds like pure noir: the narrator comes upon a crashed plane in the Paraguay River, with a kilo of cocaine and the pilot's body in it. He takes the coke and the pilot's watch, and from there the story set in a remote small town develops with a dark inevitability. He takes a job as a driver with the dead man's family and schemes to reveal the body's whereabouts to them (for a ransom), finds a distributor for the drugs, gets involved with his brother's girlfriend as well as a woman who works in the police morgue, and so on. Through it all, his voice is mostly matter-of-fact (except for some radio signals from his conscience). The book is short and fast, moving from one body to another, to threats from police and the dead pilot's family, and on to a conclusion that is distinctively inconclusive. Melo's take on noir is more ...