Current popular culture has an almost unholy fascination with torture, from the singleminded Jack Bauer on 24 to the seemingly innumerable Saw films. Award-winning crime writer Giles Blunt contributes to this canon in Breaking Lorca, but adds thoughtfulness to a cringe-worthy subject. 

Blunt is known for his Northern Ontario series featuring detective John Cardinal, but in this standalone novel he has created a suspenseful tale set in the U.S. and El Salvador around the time that the latter country found itself embroiled in a vicious civil war. Our protagonist is Victor Pena, a former army officer rescued from the firing squad by his uncle and enlisted in a secret unit dedicated to acquiring intelligence from the enemy.  

Victor, who dreams of escaping to freedom in America, is out of his depth in his uncle’s crew, among whom reading is a sign of weakness and savagery the only acceptable mode of male bonding. To prove his worth, he begins to implement the violence of his new craft on a mysterious female detainee named Lorca, whose courage and determination to stay silent astound him.

This is a crisply written book. The torture scenes feel all too real, and include graphic details that make a reader pause in contemplation of the horror that one person can inflict on another. Blunt manipulates tension by slowly revealing Victor’s fears, then increasing the pace when the squad returns its victims to the world.     

Blunt’s background as a TV writer is evident in the last third of the book, when Victor, redeemed in the eyes of his uncle, is given a chance to travel to Fort Bening for training, whereupon he flees to New York. Still obsessed with what he did to Lorca (who has conveniently escaped and is, indeed, broken), he finds and befriends her under false pretences.

The book’s ending is pure thriller, with coincidences tripping over one another (plus the requisite chase scene). The shift in tone is disappointing, following as it does on the earlier, more subtle study of a reluctant torturer’s inner life.