Don’t Send Flowers

Martín Solares is also the author of The Black Minutes, which was a finalist for France's most prestigious award for crime fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and for the distinguished Spanish-language award, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. He lives in Mexico City.

"A dry, sharp x-ray of the horror of life in the Gulf, the network of complicity, the scope of tragedy. A gritty, direct, exciting novel that is a must-read for anyone who wants to look at the hell that the Gulf (and Mexico at the same time) has become."--Antonio Ortuño From a writer whose work has been praised by Junot Díaz as "Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest," Don't Send Flowers is a riveting novel centered on Carlos Treviño, a retired police detective in northern Mexico who has to go up against the corruption and widespread violence that caused him to leave the force, when he's hired by a wealthy businessman to find his missing daughter. A seventeen-year-old girl has disappeared after a fight with her boyfriend that was interrupted by armed men, leaving the boyfriend on life support and the girl an apparent kidnap victim. It's a common occurrence in the region--prime narco territory--but the girl's parents are rich and powerful, and determined to find their daughter at any cost. When they call upon Carlos Treviño, he tracks the missing heiress north to the town of La Eternidad, on the Gulf of Mexico not far from the U.S. border--all while constantly attempting to evade detection by La Eternidad's chief of police, Commander Margarito Gonzalez, who is in the pockets of the cartels and has a score to settle with Treviño. A gritty tale of murder and kidnapping, crooked cops and violent gang disputes, Don't Send Flowers is an engrossing portrait of contemporary Mexico from one of its most original voices.