Description

‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times
‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME
‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla Martinez

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.

A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

Publisher Review

A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story * Time * Rivera Garza’s dazzling prose here becomes sharper than ever … Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory, Death Takes Me lingers inside your brain long after you’ve read it — Layla Martinez An extraordinary, fiercely imaginative novel, written with the precision of a true master of her craft … I couldn’t put it down — Juan Gomez-Jurado The novel brilliantly melds the grit and pacing of a police procedural with literary theory … It’s all seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement * Publishers Weekly *