Penguin Random House; Cardinal
It's the end of summer, so let's grab what escape we can, which, for me, means reading suspense fiction. The Intrigue, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Penguin Random House
Six years ago, I stopped eating mushrooms. The cause was Silvia Moreno-Garcia's horror novel, Mexican Gothic, in which fungi become frightful. Moreno-Garcia, who excels at playing around with genre fiction, recently brought out a noir novel set in 1940s Mexico. Called The Intrigue, it's so stylishly evil, it begs for a movie version, in black and white, of course. The plot is a classic one in which a predator risks becoming a patsy. A con artist named Ulises makes his money by placing ads in the lonely hearts sections of magazines and waiting to see if any rich widows or spinsters respond. When Perla, the owner of a mansion-turned-boarding-house in the port of Veracruz, invites Ulises to visit, he thinks he's in clover; but trouble awaits in the form of Perla's niece, Inés.
Inés rightly wonders what a man who bears a resemblance to a movie star like Tyrone Power is doing courting her grim aunt. Moreover, Inés desperately wants out from under her aunt's thumb. Who could blame her? Here's a snippet of a scene where Perla announces to friends that she's chaperoning Inés to a dance: “I will escort her,” [Perla] said firmly. My father always told us ladies from good families are like delicate flowers, which must be carefully pressed inside a good book, and I agree with him.”Inés’s hand wrapped around a fork, her fingers squeezing it tight. She wished she could stab her aunt with it. ...A carefully pressed flower, she thought. A dead thing. The double and triple crosses — as well as the body count — mount in The Intrigue, which subverted all my guesses about who would be left standing at the end.
