Taking the reins in Spain

The King's Gold
By Arturo Perez-Reverte
Putnam, 304 pp., $24.95

The Creator's Map By Emilio Calderón
Penguin, 272 pp., $24.95

The Glass of Time By Michael Cox
Norton, 583 pp., $24.95

Over the past month, as financial planets imploded, many people wondered where it all went wrong. Maybe the slide began when we emptied our purses of large metal discs known as money and filled them with flimsy paper known as cash. Plastic, of course, followed, but let's not think about that. Let's think about gold. Solid, irresistible, and back in fashion - as a commodity, not an accessory. Devotees of historical novels could have predicted this because they know that just reading about gold makes you feel better. Imagine, for example, "a secret cargo of ingots . . . eighty quintals of gold in bars" (a quintal equals 100 kilograms). This is part of the loot in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's "The King's Gold," the fourth novel in the consistently fine Captain Alatriste series. This lean adventure, set in 1626, takes place in Seville, the city of intrigue to which Alatriste returns after fighting heroically at the Siege of Breda. Accompanied by protégé Inigo Balboa, the captain reluctantly accepts another mission: to snatch the aforementioned gold from a ship anchored offshore. Without Alatriste's help, the treasure from the West Indies will end up not in King Philip IV's treasury but in enemy hands.

Pérez-Reverte, an elegant, economical writer, deftly compresses the political details while he describes Alatriste's unfolding plan and Inigo's pursuit of the dangerous Angelica. "The King's Gold" has it all: swordfights, beheadings, assignations, betrayal. But these events, although thrillingly described, are recalled by Inigo in a voice filled with longing for his lost youth and his beloved master. Alatriste, for his part, is a hero who becomes more complex with each escapade. In an empire where everybody is seemingly corrupt, he values only loyalty and honor. "Spain is going to the dogs," a courtier agrees. "Everyone steals, cheats, and lies and no one pays his debts."

The treasure at the heart of Emilio Calderón's first novel, "The Creator's Map," is not gold but paper, sacred paper. Nothing less, in fact, than a map of the world drawn by God and depicting the power centers of the universe. No wonder Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler want to acquire this, the ultimate collectible. "Himmler is convinced that our planet is hollow," one character explains, "and that inside lives a civilization of superior men. The Creator's Map would be the means to reach them." Calderón does not have to invent much here; the Nazi obsession with loony mysticism is well documented, and his even, almost clinical description of the insanity is all the more effective for its restraint.

The map is, in any case, beside the point for José María, who studies at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1937 while his country's civil war rages. A moody thinker rather than a man of action, José María is hopelessly in love with Montse. This infatuation, along with his contemplation of Spain's agony and of his own inadequacy, makes him an unlikely spy. Fate intervenes, however, when José María and Montse stumble on a 16th-century volume that reputedly contains a reference to the Creator's Map. Within a few chapters, the two young students are recruited as anti-Fascist agents and their lives become dangerously intertwined with that of the slippery Prince Junio, aristocratic Fascist and Nazi zealot.

In the twilight world that Calderón masterfully creates, courage and love may endure, but they cannot triumph, not cleanly at least. War sullies these characters, yet our sympathy for them intensifies with each twist of the clever plot. Meanwhile Rome is vividly evoked as a city upon which centuries of dictators have projected their fantasies. Visiting E42, Mussolini's urban showpiece, José María observes that the buildings "reflected the paradigm of Italian Fascism: monumental exterior and empty interior." The Vatican Library, by contrast, is tantalizingly described as a place filled with more mysteries than even the craziest Nazi could handle.

Michael Cox's sumptuous new novel, "The Glass of Time," is also filled with secrets, most of them revealed in letters. This is Victorian England, after all, a society apparently obsessed with epistolary revelations and false identities. Or so it seems when a young orphan, Esperanza Gorst, arrives at Evenwood to serve as lady's maid to the beautiful widow Lady Tansor. The girl has been sent by her guardian, a mysterious Parisian, with enigmatic instructions to observe Lady Tansor and to remedy a past injustice that involves Esperanza's own origins. All very murky. And Cox keeps it that way for a little too long, perhaps, thickening the noxious atmosphere and spicing it with hints of lesbianism. The observation that Esperanza makes of young Perseus Tansor - "He seems to me like some great frozen ocean - cold and featureless on the surface, but teeming with hidden life beneath" - could be applied to Cox's novel, which concludes with a wave of successive revelations that might have been more artfully staged.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.