Death Takes Me - by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hardcover)

About the Book

"When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written 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 lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and if they are facing a darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city"--

Book Synopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

"Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, The AV Club

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: "Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert."

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word "victim" is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

Review Quotes

Praise for Death Takes Me

"[A] deeply rewarding experience . . . dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery narrative, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel [grows] increasingly expansive as the strictures around identity grow looser and looser, encompassing more and more. In this harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza ultimately goes one step further, unsettlingly implicating readers themselves."--Katie Kitamura, The New York Times

"Death Takes Me puts a subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story."--Time, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

"Cristina Rivera Garza's writing rewires your brain, summoning the ghosts of vivid emotions you'd forgotten you could even feel."--Esquire

"A page-turner for the ages, but especially ours."--Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker "Goings On" Newsletter

"A brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry . . . underscores the Mexican novelist's intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness . . . It may well be that the novel's most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony--and even laughter."--Nicolás Medina Mora, The Atlantic

"[An] unforgettable literary puzzle . . . seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza's incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Rivera Garza's nonlinear novel of violence and literature, written in elegiac, incandescent prose, reverses the horror of the victims of femicide along the U.S.-Mexico border with taunting murders of men in the city, a pointed turnabout."--Booklist

Praise for Cristina Rivera Garza

"Cristina Rivera Garza is a writer of startling luminosity."--Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

"One of the most fiercely original literary voices from Latin America."--Ignacio M. Saìnchez Prado, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. She is an insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language."--Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red

"To read Rivera Garza's work is to experience a visceral relationship with the written word."--Sightlines

"Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator."--Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons

About the Author

Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome, The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Sarah Booker is a teacher and literary translator. Her translations include novels by Mónica Ojeda, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Gabriela Ponce. She is also an associate editor with Southwest Review.

Robin Myers is a poet and translator. Her translations include Andrés Neuman's Bariloche, Claudia Peña Claros's The Trees, Isabel Zapata's In Vitro, Eliana Hernández-Pachón's The Brush, and Cristina Rivera Garza's The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation.