“I wonder how you do it, that you can look at the world and manage to think there is a speck of fairness to it when all that the eye can see is garbage from here until forever.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes novels like no one else. In this noir novel set in the 1970s Dirty War era in Mexico, we meet two protagonists: Maite and Elvis.

Maite is bland. She’s getting “old” (past marriageable age), her mother clearly doesn’t love her as much as her sister, and she often finds herself making up lies to make her life seem more interesting to her co-workers. She lives for her romantic fantasies. Until her neighbor, Leonora, asks Maite to watch her cat for a few days... which turn into more when her neighbor goes missing. It changes everything.

Elvis is a criminal… but a naive criminal who loves rock ‘n’ roll, and ends up moving up in the ranks, in charge of finding out what happened to a girl named Leonora.

Maite and Elvis’s stories interweave together in a genius perfection. The grim noir tone was done so well, and I was cheering for both Maite and Elvis the whole time. The last section of the boom was so fast-paced and twisted that I couldn’t put it down! I also loved that Moreno-Garcia provided an Afterword with information about the Dirty War. There are spot-on song references throughout the whole book, and a Spotify playlist to go along with it!