All Intensive Purposes

A Small Death In Lisbon apparently is the best-known and best-selling of Robert Wilson's novels, but for whatever reason I came to it last, after all the others. It's very well done, but to my sensibility the plot is just a bit too ornate. I'm guessing that after Wilson wrote this one, someone told him -- or he decided -- that a surpassingly complex plot is not the ne plus ultra of the thriller genre, and in his subsequent books he reined it in a little and concentrated on some of the other challenges of the craft, with excellent results. On the other hand, if A Small Death In Lisbon sold more copies than the others, who cares what I think?