The Queen of the South Review

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(More customer reviews)The drug trade throughout Mexico, Latin America, and the Mediterranean come alive in Arturo Perez-Reverte's latest novel, quite different from his intellectual mysteries. Here he writes the "biography" of Teresa Mendoza, a young woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, who becomes the mastermind of a multimillion dollar drug empire operating from Marbella, Spain. This novel's challenge lies not in an intellectual puzzle, but in understanding the business networks Teresa builds with drug lords from Russia, Italy, Morocco, and Colombia, along with various agents of government whom she buys off. As she becomes a successful businesswoman, known as "The Queen of the South," the suspense develops: Will she stay alive? And how?
The story begins in Mexico when Teresa is twenty-three. Uneducated but attractive, she is in love with Guero Davila, a Chicano pilot involved in shipping coca. When she suddenly receives a phone call telling her to run for her life, she does so, escaping through Mexico City into Spain, and then Morocco. Putting her knowledge of drug transportation to work by involving herself in hash-running between Morocco and Spain, she ends up with a short jail sentence but an important friendship with another inmate, Patty O'Farrell, the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Spanish family. When they are released, they set up a big-time drug trafficking business, with Teresa running the show and becoming, eventually, the person with whom everyone in the business must deal.
Teresa's story is not told in linear fashion. An unnamed speaker/narrator, presumably Perez-Reverte himself, has come to Sinaloa to investigate and describe Teresa Mendoza's life and business. Interviewing everyone with any information, he inserts himself and his interviews into the narrative. Soon the line begins to blur between fiction and fact, since some of the people he interviews, such as the three people to whom he dedicates the novel, are, in fact, real people who are included as characters in the novel. These add depth and a fine sense of realism to the novel.
Although Teresa Mendoza is not a character with whom the reader will identify, the author develops a certain amount of sympathy for her. Teresa is an entrepreneur of great intelligence, and this, combined with her ability to avoid creating any sort of trail that will implicate her legally, keeps her going in her dog-eat-dog world. The novel is episodic but fast paced, despite the sometimes unwelcome intrusions of the narrator/speaker, and Perez-Reverte succeeds in presenting a broad, intriguing picture of the business of drug smuggling and those who make it their careers. Mary Whipple


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