The Colours of Death

It’s not easy to do something genuinely original with the police procedural crime novel, but Marques has succeeded in bending her genres here to create something fresh and fascinating.

Author: Patricia Marques

Finished on: 12 August 2021

A man is dead – apparently having thrown himself repeatedly at a window on a crowded commuter train in Lisbon. We open as Detective Isabel Reis is called to this bloody scene to get to the bottom of what happened to the high profile and powerful Gil Dos Santos.

But this is no ordinary police procedural. Patricia Marques cleverly imbues The Colours of Death with elements of fantasy – this is a world where people are split into normals and ‘Gifteds’, those who have supernatural skills. What at first might seem like a clear case of suicide – albeit a particularly savage and gory one – may have been a murder committed by telekinesis. And Dos Santos has plenty of enemies; there’s no shortage of people with a motive – the main question is whether any of them have abilities powerful enough to have killed him in such a brutal way.

Detective Reis is a Gifted herself. She is telepathic, something which proves to be both a blessing and a curse to her over the course of the investigation. This is very much her story – we delve back into her past, the events and difficult family dynamics that surrounded the discovery of her gift.

While Marques demonstrates beautifully subtle worldbuilding skills to create the alternative reality of The Colours of Death, the Lisbon that emerges from the pages is very real. The city is depicted with glorious vivacity, not only the cityscapes but also the culture and the food. Reis eats almost constantly to keep the strength up to maintain her gift, and the descriptions of the array of Portuguese dishes she consumes are a real mouthwatering highlight of the book.

As Reis and her colleagues make their way through the tangle of this case, growing ever closer to its dramatic denouement, they must navigate through the fear-driven prejudices against Gifteds to find the truth. It’s a case fraught with danger which builds to a hair-raising conclusion.

It’s not easy to do something genuinely original with the police procedural crime novel, but Marques has succeeded in bending her genres here to create something fresh and fascinating.