Purity of blood (Limpieza de sangre)

"He has been known to flirt with higher literary flights, notably in The Club Dumas, but in his hardboiled, mordantly funny, unapologetically entertaining Captain Alatriste series (of which this is the second volume), Pérez-Reverte firmly buckles on his swash and swaggers into the muddy, bloody streets of 17th century Madrid."
Time 16 de enero de 2006

"Intelligent exciting historical swashbucklers...With writing rich in the minutiae of 17th-century Madrid life and interspersed with poetry, the author is clearly having a ball and the reader can join with him."
Waterstones Quarterly

"Purity of Blood is the latest in a line of utterly unputdownable novels by Arturo Pérez-Reverte in which he has finessed a storytelling tradition stretching back to his great literary predecessors...This latest book is brimming with all the panache of previous novels by the writer and with even more confidence...This is glorious stuff, the kind of book to remind us how exhilarating old-fashioned adventure writing can be."
Daily Express

"What is impressive is how much of Spain the author manages to pack into a short novel...offers glimpses of artistic feuds and vivid sketches of street life. This is fiction that can be enjoyed on several levels: as a poignant evocation of doomed imperial splendour; as a clever literary game in which historical and invented figures rub shoulders; as a parable about racism past and present; or as a simple tale of swashbuckling derring-do."
The Times

"Vivid depictions of the Inquisition and its public theatre of auto de fe...Alatriste emerges as an existentialist, fighting not just for money but because "there is no choice but to fight". In other words, all against one, and one against all: a noir swordsman for our times"
Times Literary Supplement