As the prosecutor Chalcatana investigates a series of gruesome murders suspected to be the work of a serial killer, he worries that Maoist terrorism may be slowly returning. And Roncagliolo's Red Aprilalso uses the crime thriller to delve into the aftermath of that time when, it's estimated, more than 70,000 people were killed. Vargas Llosa's novel Death In The Andes expertly framed the bloody Maoist insurgency and guerrilla war in 1980s and early 1990s Peru around a whodunnit. In Latin America, he is already considered something of an inheritor to the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's throne. It was when the English-speaking world caught up. But anyone who has been keeping an eye on Roncagliolo - at 36 the prize's youngest recipient - will know that last week wasn't the point at which he burst on to the scene. After all, the impressive shortlist contained an author who had already won it once before (Per Petterson), and the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's love story The Museum Of Innocence. When the Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last week - the annual £10,000 (Dh60,000) award given to the best work of contemporary fiction translated into English - it was tempting to call it a shock victory.
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