Crime Fiction Mystery Thriller

The Queen of the South

Name: The Queen of the South
Rating: 3.95 (15836 reviews)
Author: Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Arturo Pérez-Reverte January 1, 2002

3.95 15.8k Ratings

Ongoing Status

35 Views

Start Reading

Synopsis

Guero Davila is a pilot engaged in drug-smuggling for the local cartels. Teresa Mendoza is his girlfriend, a typical narco’s morra– quiet, doting, submissive. But then Guero’s caught playing both sides, and in Sinaloa, that means death. Teresa finds herself alone, terrified, friendless and running to save her life, carrying nothing but a gym bag containing a pistol and a notebook that she has been forbidden to read. Forced to leave Mexico, she flees to the Spanish city of Melilla, where she meets Santiago Fisterra, a Galician involved in trafficking hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar. When Santiago’s partner is captured, it is Teresa who steps in to take his place. Now Teresa has plunged into the dark and ugly world that once claimed Guero’s life– and she’s about to get in deeper…

Books similar to The Queen of the South

The Flanders Panel

★ 3.78

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

While restoring a 15th-century painting which depicts a chess game between the Duke of Flanders and his knight, Julia, a young art expert, discovers a hidden inscription in the corner: Quis Necavit Equitem. Translation: Who killed the knight? Breaking the silence of five centuries, Julia's hunt for a Renaissance murderer leads her into a modern-day game of sin, betrayal, and death.

The Club Dumas

★ 3.81

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.

Death of a Nationalist

★ 3.79

Rebecca Pawel

This war has drawn international attention. In a dress rehearsal for World War II, fascists support the Nationalists, while communists have come to the aid of the Republicans. Atrocities have devastated both sides. It is at this moment, when the Republicans have surrendered, and the Guardia Civil has begun to impose order in the ruins of Madrid, that Tejada finds the body of his best friend, a hero of the siege of Toledo, shot to death on a street named Amor de Dios. Naturally, a Red is suspected. And it is easy for Tejada to assume that the woman caught kneeling over the body is the killer. But when his doubts are aroused, he cannot help seeking justice.

The Traitor’s Emblem

★ 3.86

Juan Gómez-Jurado

THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER . In the vein of Dumas' and Zafón's masterpieces, Juan Gómez-Jurado's The Traitor's Emblem is an epic novel spanning decades of family betrayal, impossible love and the high price of vengeance. Set against the dark and menacing streets of Depression-era Munich and the cruel rise of Nazism, Gómez-Jurado's spellbinding thriller proves again that he is a master of narration.

The Straits of Gibraltar, 1940. In the heart of a storm at sea, Captain GonzÁlez rescues a group of German castaways. When the torrent subsides, the leader of the survivors gratefully offers the captain a strange-looking emblem made of gold and diamonds, in exchange for safe passage to the coast of Portugal. Decades later, in 2002, the son of captain GonzÁlez receives a substantial offer for the emblem. He does not sell it, but the buyer reveals an astounding story behind that mysterious it holds the key to Paul Reiner's lifelong quest...

Munich, 1919. After his family fall into disgrace, 15-year-old Paul Reiner and his mother work as servants in the palace of Baron Von Schroeder. Unhappy and full of despair, Paul dreams of the heroic father he never knew. But one night, seconds before committing suicide, Paul's cousin reveals a terrible secret. Paul's father didn't die in the First World War, as he had always been told. He was killed by someone very close to him, and for unclear reasons. This discovery turns Paul's world upside down and from that moment, Paul sacrifices everything to discover the truth behind his father's death, even his love for Alys Tannenbaum, a Jewish-American photographer who helps him on his dangerous pursuit.

Visit TheTraitorsEmblem.com

God’s Spy

★ 3.82

Juan Gómez-Jurado

An instant bestseller in Spain, with rights sold in twenty-eight countries and counting, God’s Spy is a spectacular contemporary thriller set in the Vatican, where, in the aftermath of Pope John Paul II’s death, the hunt for a serial killer reveals a chilling conspiracy.

In the days following the Pope’s death, a cardinal is found brutally murdered in a chapel in Rome, his eyes gouged and his hands cut off. Called in for the grisly case, police inspector Paola Dicanti learns that another cardinal was recently found dead; he had also been tortured. Desperate to find the killer before another victim dies, Paola’s investigation is soon joined by Father Anthony Fowler—an American priest and former Army intelligence officer examining sexual abuse in the Church, who knows far more about the killer than Paola could possibly imagine.

As Paola and Father Anthony struggle through a maze of tantalizing clues, they begin to question whether someone in the Vatican is aiding their cause or abetting a murderer. And when evidence leads them to powerful figures within the Church hierarchy, their own pursuit of the truth may make them the next pawns to be sacrificed in a terrifying and deadly game.

A dazzling, impossible-to-put-down thriller, Juan Gómez-Jurado’s God’s Spy marks the arrival of a major new talent to the contemporary suspense fiction scene.

The Day of the Jackal

★ 4.27

Frederick Forsyth

Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

The Jackal. A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.

One man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

The Bottoms

★ 4.19

Joe R. Lansdale

The narrator of The Bottoms is Harry Collins, an old man obsessively reflecting on certain key experiences of his childhood. In 1933, the year that forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek, Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is also, as Harry will soon discover, the first in a series of similar corpses, all of them the victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.

From his privileged position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time barber) Jacob Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation unfolds. As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of the local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface, even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories. With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains at large and continues to threaten the safety and stability of the town.

Lansdale uses this protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, absolutely convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world and have since been buried under the concrete and cement of the industrialized juggernaut of the late 20th century. In Lansdale's hands, the gritty realities of Depression-era Texas are as authentic -- and memorable -- as anything in recent American fiction.

American Tabloid

★ 4.19

James Ellroy

We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C....

Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy...

Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty...

Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....

James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best books of the year.

"Hard-bitten ... ingenious ... Ellroy segues into political intrigue without missing a beat." —The New York Times

"Vastly entertaining." —Los Angeles Times

"One hellishly exciting ride." —Detroit Free Press

"A supremely controlled work of art." —The New York Times Book Review