The Mexican Noir Reader
Welcome to the dark side of the sun.
Mexican Noir is more than just crime fiction set south of the border. Big, gripping stories expose the tension between the country’s rich culture and the brutal machinery of drugs, power, and corruption.
These books are the perfect starting point. Links go to Amazon.
While the protagonist is a hard-bitten American FBI agent, this is really a modern cartel epic. It’s brutal but authentic, with many of the coarser cartel actions taken from actual events. Essential for understanding the how Mexican organized crime works.
WHY I RECOMMEND: A brutal but gripping thriller that shows the motives behind narco violence and the terrible toll on law enforcement.
Death in Veracruz by Héctor Aguilar Camín
This is a classic political thriller that explores the intersection of journalism, power, and the oil industry in Mexico. Like the Emilia Cruz series, it focuses heavily on how corruption is woven into the fabric of daily life and the personal cost of trying to expose it.
WHY I RECOMMEND: Oil as a source of power and corruption can be overlooked in the news coming out of Mexico but not here.
Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Set in the 1970s against the backdrop of student protests and dirty war politics, the story follows a daydreaming secretary and a lonely enforcer who are both looking for a missing woman. Atmospheric and character-driven, it’s also a lesson in Mexican politics.
WHY I RECOMMEND: Besides the smooth prose and the characters’ inner voices, this reminds us of the now mostly forgotten student rebellions in Mexico of the 60’s and 70’s.
Based on the true disappearance of 43 students from a teaching college in 2014. Detective Emilia Cruz leaves Acapulco to join a task force investigating a mirror crime. Shocking and compelling, the story provides answers to the real unsolved crime.
WHY I RECOMMEND: This is the most noir of all the Detective Emilia Cruz books, taking an unflinching look at Mexico’s mass disappearances and the fecklessness of Mexico City’s attempts to cope.
The Eagle’s Throne by Carlos Fuentes
A lesson in Mexican power politics and corruption, this story is told completely through letters. Military generals, politicians and others do their worst to come out on top, but are treated to a crafty twist ending.
WHY I RECOMMEND: No other book captures so perfectly the inner machinations of the powerful interests that ran–and possibly still run–Mexico’s federal government.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
A dark, visceral investigation into the murder of an accused witch in a small Mexican town. It captures the atmosphere of poverty, mythology, and violence with a relentless prose style that defines contemporary Mexican Noir.
WHY I RECOMMEND: This is an admittedly difficult book for the modern reader to take on, with crude language and streaming prose, but the harshness of the rural Mexican setting rings true.
Federales by Christopher Irvin
A washed-up US agent takes a job as a bodyguard to a female Mexican mayor under pressure from a local cartel. A riveting, heart-wrenching tale based on a true murder mystery.
WHY I RECOMMEND: This is based on a true murder and demonstrates what happens when good people stand up to the cartels if they are forced to go it alone.
All Our Wars by Stephanie Vasquez
The daughter of a Mexican narco is brought back to Mexico and forced to take his place as head of the family-run cartel. But criminal rivalries and an old lover, combined with treachery within her own family, force her into a power play to survive.
WHY I RECOMMEND: A well-written story that exposes the rivalry and back-stabbing that goes on inside the narco world. Plus a star-crossed love story.
Soliders and Kings by Jason de Leon
Not fiction, this compelling saga of the coyotes who guide migrants through Mexico to the border with the US is essential reading to understand the complexity, violence and destructiveness of the journey and how it is a cottage industry prey to organized crime.
WHY I RECOMMEND: It’s impossible to truly understand the very real but noir world of unauthorized migration through Mexico without understanding the underworld that enables it.