Silver Bullets
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Tormented by past heartbreak and contemporary politics, for Edgar 'Lefty' Mendieta the news of the murder of lawyer Bruno Canizales represents just another day at the office in the drug-ridden city of Culiacán.
It soon becomes clear that there is no shortage of suspects in a city where it's hard to tell the gangsters from the politicians. Canizales was the son of a former government minister and the partner of a drug baron's daughter, with his own penchant for cross-dressing and dangerous sex. What is less clear is why the assassin chose to use a silver bullet. And why, two days later, they seem to have struck again.
In this sweltering city where a desire for the truth can be as dangerous as any drug, Mendieta's search for justice takes him from mansions to drug dens, in Élmer Mendoza's seminal founding text of Latin America's 'narco-lit' wave.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Culiac n, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa where "gangsta-wraps" (slain narco soldiers swathed in blankets) are found next to the roadside almost daily provides the deadly backdrop for Mendoza's English-language debut, a straightforward crime novel set in 2006. The authorities call in Det. Edgar "Lefty" Mendieta on a possible homicide and a suicide, but since there are connections to drugs, they instruct him to hand the cases over to Narcotics even though killings are occurring using silver bullets. Assisted by a spunky female sidekick, Lefty carries on, haunted by memories of having been molested as a child and the return of a femme fatale from his past. This mystery won the Tusquets Prize for best Spanish-language crime novel in 2007, but American readers may find Lefty's by-the-book investigations overly familiar. In addition, the dialogue mingles with the exposition, without quotation marks, so otherwise simple passages often prove more opaque than need be.
