By Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Random House, 211 pp, $28, hardcover

Andrés Faulques, a former war photographer, has retired to an 18th-century watchtower on the Mediterranean coast of Spain to paint a huge mural. The artwork, which draws on both his experiences in places like Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Balkans and memories of such works as The Burning of Troy by Francisco Collantes and Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War, forms a constant reference point in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s new novel The Painter of Battles.

“The whole formed an immense and disquieting landscape, no title, no specific time, where the shield half-buried in the sand, the medieval helmet splashed with blood, the shadow of an assault rifle falling over a field of wood crosses…coexisted less as anachronisms than as evidence.”

Then an old soldier, Ivo Markovic, appears at the watchtower. Markovic was the subject of an award-winning photograph Faulques took during the bloody Balkan conflict of the 1990s. The photograph had disastrous consequences for Markovic: he was captured and tortured for six months by Serbs who recognized him from a magazine, and his wife was raped and then murdered, along with his young son.

Markovic has come to kill Faulques. First, though, he says, “I need to know you better, to be sure that you realize certain things. I want you to learn and understand.…After that, I’ll be able to kill you.”

Instead of fleeing, Faulques accepts his visitor, and a series of conversations begins on love, war, human cruelty, and moral responsibility. Inevitably, these transport him back to his time with the beautiful Olvido Ferrara, who died in Croatia a few days after the fateful image was taken. Witty, warm, and wise, she illuminated his life, but her demise left him a man “standing beside the black river, watched from the other side by the melancholy specters he had known with life”.

Although not in the same vein as Pérez-Reverte’s previous literary thrillers or his swashbuckling Captain Alatriste series, The Painter of Battles is a deeply thoughtful book that draws heavily on the author’s own experiences as a war correspondent.

At one point, Faulques opines that since the 17th century, no one apart from Goya has been “bold enough to contemplate a human being realistically touched by death, with authentic blood instead of the syrup of heroes in his veins”. Not anymore.