This is the most full-blown novel yet from Pérez-Reverte, with a wonderfully drawn main character and a very intriguing plotline. If youve already enjoyed his work youll be quite pleased with this one. Recommended by Mark, Powells Books at Cedar Hills Crossing The critically acclaimed, beloved, and bestselling author of The Club Dumas and The Nautical Chart delivers his most magnificent novel to date. Few authors inspire the kind of passion that Arturo Pérez-Reverte does. Reviewers, readers, and book-sellers alike have embraced his fiction as the perfect blend of suspense and literary ambition. A global bestseller, he is one of the most admired and widely read authors in the world. And his stunning new novel is his best yet. A remarkable tale, The Queen of the South spans continents, from the dusty streets of Mexico to the sparkling waters off the coast of Morocco, to Spain and the Strait of Gibraltar. A sweeping story set to the irresistible beat of the drug smugglers ballads, it encompasses sensuality and cruelty, love and betrayal, as its heroines story unfolds. Teresa Mendozas boyfriend is a drug smuggler the narcos of Sinaloa, Mexico, call the king of the short runway, because he can get a plane full of coke off the ground in three hundred yards. But in a ruthless business, life can be short, and Teresa even has a special cell phone that Guero gave her along with a dark warning: If that phone rings, it means hes dead, and shed better run, because theyre coming for her next. Then the call comes. In order to survive, she will have to say goodbye to the old Teresa, an innocent girl who once entrusted her life to a pinche narco smuggler. She will have to find inside herself a woman who is tough enough to inhabit a world as ugly and dangerous as that of the narcos — a woman she never before knew existed. Indeed, the woman who emerges will surprise even those who know her legend, that of the Queen of the South.