Death Takes Me — Cristina Rivera Garza

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.