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.
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.
Commendable ... Rivera Garza’s nonlinear novel of violence and literature, written in elegiac, incandescent prose, reverses the horror of the victims of femicide along the U.S.-Mexico border with taunting murders of men in the city, a pointed turnabout.
