When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written in coral nail polish: 'Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.' After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.
Seamlessly translated ... This detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre ... Exceptional style ... Deeply rewarding ... The novel is dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow ... [A] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.
Unabashed intellectualism ... Readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts ... It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma.
Garcia plays with genre and metafiction in a way that will attract many readers, but confuse others ... It’s hard to say precisely what Garza wants from us. Many readers enjoy a good literary mystery, turning pages back and forth and trying to piece together clues, but the battle to figure out who is speaking in a given chapter, or who they’re referencing, can unnecessarily confuse more interesting questions such as unreliable narrators or themes of gender inversion ... Fascinating riddles and questions are unfortunately hidden behind what may be one too many experiments in this newest outing by Garza.
