This is the fourth story featuring poet/detective Tomás Vilalta and his archaeologist partner Gritta Becker, set on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. (Read about the other three here.)
In this, Mireille Cabrol, a well-known Mallorcan artist with a remote family tie to Cezanne goes missing, and Vilalta traces her to the Medieval walled town of Alcúdia, and nearby S'Albufera Natural Park. There, while painting purple herons and other exotic waterbirds, the painter has reportedly stumbled across bird traffickers and subsequently vanished. The trail leads Vilalta still further into the wilds of the island to an old hermitage where Mireille was last seen, in the company of a young woman with the look of an exotic bird the artist has for unknown reasons befriended.
I offer this small taste to whet the appetite:
He'd brought home with him a postcard of one of Mireille Cabrol's paintings, which he studied while the stew simmered. Gritta got up, stretched, hugged him, poured them wine from a bottle of good moscato, and picked up the card with curiosity.
"Purple herons were significant in Egyptian mythology," she told him. "Associated with creation, renewal, the Phoenix."
"Maybe Mireille Cabrol made that association too, if it's well known," Vilalta mused, interested. "She seems determined to show the Phoenix rising from the fire." He told Gritta about the devastating fire, and the artist's studio with [canvases of herons everywhere like] upswept purple flame.
He dished the mussels and broth into bowls, the rustic brown clay dishware saturated with intense turquoise recently purchased from a fabrica north of Palma, and they went out to the arbor to eat, among the herbs and aloes and a mass of purple bougainvillea.
