Don't Send Flowers

March 15, 2018

Mexico City-based Solares debuted with The Black Minutes, a finalist for France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (for crime fiction) and the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Here, dark doings are again refracted through Solares's literary sensibility as Carlos Treviño tracks down a kidnapped 17-year-old girl for her wealthy parents, struggling to avoid a cartel-friendly police chief who has it in for him.

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June 11, 2018
Solares follows The Black Minutes with a gripping crime story set amid Mexico’s escalating drug cartel wars and a nationwide atmosphere of police and judicial corruption. Extortion, kidnapping, and wholesale murder rule the Gulf city of La Eternidad in 2014. When a wealthy businessman’s teenage daughter is kidnapped, he reluctantly asks ex-cop Carlos Treviño for help. However, because he was an honest cop, Carlos is hiding from his most dangerous enemy: Police Chief Margarito González, a corrupt, vicious killer with a grudge. Carlos takes the case but knows he cannot trust anyone—certainly not the police, the military, the American consul, the man who hired him, or even the loyal bodyguard assigned to help him. His investigation is full of menace and contradictions, pitting him against merciless narco gangs and the equally ruthless and greedy officials who protect them. Betrayal is a constant threat, and Carlos knows he’s on borrowed time. He is a good detective, bold and smart, and soon realizes the kidnapping is much more complex and sinister than he first thought. This is an excellent, frightening portrayal of the breadth and depth of Mexico’s cartel violence and systemic corruption. Agent: Veronica Gagno, Schavelzon Graham Agencia.

June 15, 2018
Crime novels don't get much grittier or more brutal than the second thriller by Solares (The Black Minutes, 2010), set in a contemporary northern Mexico that's a blood-soaked moonscape."This isn't a city anymore," a former colleague tells Carlos Treviño when the ex-cop returns to the corrupt, cartel-run coastal city of La Eternidad. "It's a...western." The teenage daughter of a wealthy industrialist has been kidnapped--an everyday occurrence here, given the vicious turf wars and power struggles that have emptied out the city, closed its clubs and restaurants, and left the streets filled with countless roadblock shakedowns and the burned-out husks of cars. But the girl's body hasn't been discovered, and there's been no demand for ransom. Might she still be saved? Though Treviño is a wanted man here, having crossed the police chief and his minions by being incorruptible, the reluctant detective gets coaxed back from his remote hideaway by the possibility of a gigantic paycheck. Meanwhile, Treviño's old police antagonist, the venal opportunist (and thus survivor) Chief Margarito González, is trying to feather his nest before retiring, and he'd love to exact revenge against Treviño on the way out. Solares' great gift here is for setting. He captures heart-wrenchingly the grim chaos and hopelessness of a country run by drug lords, smugglers, and the sleazy kleptocrats they own. Some readers may struggle with the machismo that dominates not only the city, but the novel, and in the second half especially, which focuses on Margarito's grafts within grafts and intrigues within intrigues, the plot and structure grow a bit too baroque and disorderly, but Solares keeps the pace high, the pages turning.A sort of Mexico Confidential, with noirish atmosphere to burn and a very high body count.

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Starred review from June 1, 2018
Upping the ante on his exuberant, inventive debut, The Black Minutes (2010), Solares returns with a hugely ambitious, two-part crime novel depicting the near-total breakdown of society in the fictionalMexican port city of La Eternidad, Tamaulipas, presumably modeled on his hometown of Tampico. In part one, ex-cop Carlos Trevi�o, run out of town because he dared to catch a killer, is hired to find a powerful businessman's kidnapped daughter. Part two is told from the POV of his nemesis, the powerful and wholly corrupt Police Chief Margarito Gonzales, who now has urgent problems of his own. Plot summary is pointless. This is a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale set in a society where there is no center to hold; where the army, police force, and drug cartels all function as gangs with complex agendas and shifting alliances; and where human life comes unspeakably cheap. Solares offers a harrowing vision of how it all works, or doesn't, from the bribes that grease the wheels to the blood that paints the walls, to the last gasps of the peaceful town and the natural world around it. Exposition occasionally intrudes upon the fiction, and the lack of linearity will deter some readers, but this is another urgent and vital work from a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)