A Small Death in Lisbon

Two narratives converge in this dual-timeline thriller: a contemporary Lisbon detective piecing together the murder of a teenage girl found on a beach near Cascais, and a 1940s SS officer operating in neutral Lisbon, brokering wolfram — tungsten for armaments — from Portuguese mines. The city Wilson describes exists in both eras: the Lapa neighborhood mansions, the waterfront at Belém, the hills above the Estádio Nacional. Portugal's wartime neutrality — trading with both sides, sheltering refugees and intelligence agents alike — gives the historical thread a particular moral weight that surfaces, slowly, in the present.