Silver Bullets - Tapa dura

"The literary representative of modern-day Mexico in its narco-incarnation . . . The most important thing that's happened in Mexican literature in the last thirty years."
--Gaby Wood, Sunday Telegraph


"a skillfully written novel"--The Crime Scene

"Presents Mexico in a darkly surrealist light: corrupt politicos, a plague of narco-crime and only battered detective Edgar "Lefty" Mendieta on the side of the angels."--Barry Forshaw, Independent

"If you are fed up with formulaic noir novels and looking for something fresher, Elmer Mendoza's dazzling Silver Bullets could be the answer."--John Dugdale, Sunday Times

"Casts a wide net over modern Mexican life and an array of well-drawn characters, some powerful, some weak, some depraved . . . Mendoza's creation is nothing like standard pulp fiction."--Justin Warshaw, Times Literary Supplement


""Mendoza has transformed the corruption, chaos, and constant bloodletting of Mexico's disastrous War on Drugs into blackly comic fiction . . . The battle between the cartels is not so much Mendoza's subject matter as the medium in which the events he describes take place. The novels' very construction suggests that in this world some lives matter a lot more than others, and that some deaths are not worth investigating because it's obvious who did it . . . Murder is a part of everyday life."--London Review of Books

It's just another day at the office for Detective Edgar "Lefty" Mendieta: abandoned by the woman he loves, demoralized by his city's (nad his nation's) ubiquitous corruption, and in dire need of some psychotherapy. Against this backdrop, he catches the case of Bruno Canizales, a high-powered lawyer with a double life, who was killed by a single silver bullet.
Throwing himself into his work, Mendieta begins to piece together the details of Canizales' life. The son of a former government minister, and the lover of a drug lord's daughter, Canizales it seems had a penchant for cross-dressing and edgy sex.
In the sweltering city of Culiacán, Mexico's capital of narco-crime, Mendieta scrambles to follow several leads. His dogged pursuit of the killer takes him from glitzy mansions to drug dens, from down-at-the-heels reporters to glamorous transsexuals. When a second, apparently related murder surfaces, Mendieta discovers that his desire to unearth the truth has become as overpowering as any drug.