The Queen of the South [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Author) "I always thought that those narcocorridos about Mexican drug runners were just songs, and that The Count of Monte Cristo was just a novel..." (more)
Key Phrases: pinche madre, rubber cone, fifty knots, Teresa Mendoza, Gato Fierros, Dris Larbi (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Readers of Pérez-Reverte's sixth thriller won't be able to turn the pages fast enough: the author of The Club Dumas, The Seville Communion and other literary adventure novels now tackles the gritty world of drug trafficking in Mexico, southern Spain and Morocco, offering a frightening, fascinating look at the international business of transporting cocaine and hashish as well as a portrait of a smart, fast, daring and lucky woman, Teresa Mendoza. As the novel opens, Teresa's phone rings. She doesn't have to answer it: the phone is a special one given to her by her boyfriend, drug runner and expert Cessna pilot Güero Dávila. He has warned her that if a call ever came, it meant he was dead, and that she had to run for her own life. On the lam, Teresa leaves Mexico for Morocco, where she keeps a low profile transporting drug shipments with her new lover. But after a terrible accident and a brief stint in prison, Teresa's on her own again. She manages to find her way, but Teresa is no mere survivor: gaining knowledge in every endeavor she becomes involved in and using her own head for numbers and brilliant intuition, she eventually winds up heading one of the biggest drug traffic rings in the Mediterranean. Spanning 12 years and introducing a host of intriguing, scary characters, from Teresa's drug-addicted prison comrade to her former assassin turned bodyguard, the novel tells the gripping tale of "a woman thriving in a world of dangerous men."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post
The name of Edmond Dantès does not appear until more than 150 pages into Arturo Pérez-Reverte's sixth novel, but by then the reader already has figured out that The Queen of the South is a variation upon Dantès's story as told by Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. This is scarcely surprising, since the plot of Pérez-Reverte's second novel, The Club Dumas (1997), revolves around a fragment of the manuscript of The Three Musketeers, and since the influence of Dumas is self-evident in all the rest of Pérez-Reverte's work.

Like the great 19th-century French novelist whom he so openly and unapologetically emulates, Pérez-Reverte is drawn to elaborate plots adorned with numerous subplots, full-speed-ahead narrative, outsized characters and a degree of intellectual seriousness not ordinarily associated with bestseller-list fiction. Formerly a journalist, he puts his reporter's skills to work in the accumulation of intricate detail and the evocation of exotic cities and landscapes. His work is a great deal of fun to read and offers the bonus of substance as well as style.

Like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Queen of the South is a story of betrayal and revenge. The betrayed is Teresa Mendoza, a Mexican in her early twenties whose boyfriend, a pilot and drug-runner named Raimundo Davila Parra, aka Guero, is killed when his plane is shot down by a couple of hit men in the employ of . . . in the employ of whom is one of the mysteries not solved until the novel's closing pages. In any event, what matters more than naming names is the effect of the killing on Teresa Mendoza.

Until then she had been, or had seemed, just another pretty girl attached to just another daredevil, "a girl like so many others -- quieter, even, than most, not too bright, not too pretty," but like Edmond Dantès she is transformed by betrayal and its aftermath. In her case "something had died with Guero," a "certain innocence, perhaps, or an unjustified sense of security." Assaulted by gunmen who clearly intend to kill her (and one of them rapes her), she responds violently and escapes. She makes her way to Spain and then Morocco. She takes a new lover, another drug-runner, Santiago Fisterra, and when his sidekick is killed she steps in, learning the tricks of a very tricky, dangerous trade: "The little Mexican girl that little more than a year earlier had taken off running in Culiacán was now a woman experienced in midnight runs and scares, in sailing skills, in boat mechanics, in winds and currents."

Eventually she lands in prison, El Puerto de Santa Maria, where she meets her mentor just as, in the Chateau d'If, Dantès meets his Abbé Faria. Hers is named Patricia O'Farrell Meca. She gives Teresa a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo -- "Edmond Dantès is me," Teresa tells her -- and teaches her many things, as a former prison social worker remembers a few years later:

"Mendoza discovered the usefulness of an education. . . . She read, studied. She discovered that you don't have to depend on a man. She was good at figures, and she found the opportunity to get even better at them in the prison education program, which allowed inmates to get time off their sentences for taking classes. She took an elementary mathematics course and a course in Spanish, and her English improved tremendously as well. She became a voracious reader, and toward the end you might find her with an Agatha Christie novel or a book of travel writing or even something scientific. And it was O'Farrell, definitely, who inspired all that."

Before the two are released, Patty tells Teresa, "I've got a treasure hidden on the outside," to which Teresa replies, "Just like Abbé Faria." Like the Abbé's treasure, it is hidden in a cave, but it is something quite different from the gold and silver and jewels that await Dantès: a "stash of coke, the half a shipment, half a ton that everybody thought was lost and sold off on the black market . . . still all packed up nice and neat and stashed in a cave on the coast near Cape Trafalgar, waiting for somebody to come and give it a lift home." Which is just what Patty and Teresa do, though it is Teresa who quickly becomes the dominant partner as they hook up with the Russian mafia and then set up "an infrastructure whose legal front was named Transer Naga, S.L.," and which turns "the Strait of Gibraltar into the largest cocaine entry point in southern Europe." Soon Teresa is "a legend: a woman thriving in a world of dangerous men." As one person tells the novel's narrator:

"She was very smart and very fast. Her rise in that very dangerous world was a surprise to everyone. She took big risks and was lucky. . . . From the woman riding with her boyfriend in that speedboat to the woman I knew, it's a big jump, I'll tell you. You've seen the press reports, I presume. The photos in ¡Hola! and all that. She got refinement, manners, a bit of culture. And she became powerful. A legend, they say. The Queen of the South. The reporters called her that. . . . To us, she was always just La Mexicana."

The speaker is a captain in the Guardia Civil, one of many law-enforcement officers trying to crack Teresa's elaborate "business dealings," through which flow "more than seventy percent of the drug traffic in the Mediterranean." Over and over again they fail, not least because "one-third of Transer Naga's income went to 'public relations' on both sides of the Strait; politicians, government personnel, state security agents," all of whom are careful to see that the inner workings of her operation are impenetrable to outsiders generally, the law most particularly.

She is driven in part by vengeance, in part by "a sense of symmetry," a desire to keep "accounts balanced and closets in order." She believes that she has put Mexico and the terrible events there far behind her, but of course it all catches up to her eventually, and she has to make some hard, painful choices. As one of her Russian friends tells her: "There is one necessary skill. Yes. In this business. Looking at a man and instantly knowing two things. First, how much he's going to sell himself for. And second, when you're going to have to kill him." Suffice it to say that when the time comes for her to use Skill #2, she doesn't blink.

The Queen of the South is complicated, lively and, in its depiction of the drug trade and those who run it, convincing. Pérez-Reverte doesn't wince from tough, nasty business. He's an ace at chase scenes -- the one in which Teresa and Santiago crash at 50 knots into an unforgiving rock is especially vivid -- and the shootout at the novel's climax could be right out of Sam Peckinpah, blood and guts spattered all over the place. Pérez-Reverte knows his stuff, and brings all of it to life.

Unfortunately, though, The Queen of the South labors under a debilitating structural problem. It is told not by an omniscient narrator but by an unnamed first-person journalist who is digging into Teresa's background, talking with some who knew her, but has only one brief encounter with Teresa herself. Yet this narrator is not in the least reluctant to tell us her most intimate thoughts and experiences: "She would almost have been able to love him, Teresa thought sometimes"; "They had made love almost all afternoon, like there was no tomorrow"; "There are two kinds of women, she started to say to herself, but she couldn't complete the thought, because she stopped thinking."

To which the only response from the reader can be: How does he know that? In fiction no less than in nonfiction, the narrator must be credible. The narrator of The Queen of the South is not. Every time he represents Teresa's thoughts, emotions and erotic experiences -- and he does so innumerable times -- one is left to wonder how he knows that. The result, in the end, is a book the reader simply cannot believe, much though the reader may want to.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• ISBN-10: 0399151850
• ASIN: B000EXYZWW
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,045,928 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I think there are dreams that can kill you.", October 16, 2004

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: The Queen of the South (Hardcover)

The drug trade throughout Mexico, Latin America, and the Mediterranean come alive in Arturo Perez-Reverte's latest novel, quite different from his intellectual mysteries. Here he writes the "biography" of Teresa Mendoza, a young woman from Sinaloa, Mexico, who becomes the mastermind of a multimillion dollar drug empire operating from Marbella, Spain. This novel's challenge lies not in an intellectual puzzle, but in understanding the business networks Teresa builds with drug lords from Russia, Italy, Morocco, and Colombia, along with various agents of government whom she buys off. As she becomes a successful businesswoman, known as "The Queen of the South," the suspense develops: Will she stay alive? And how?

The story begins in Mexico when Teresa is twenty-three. Uneducated but attractive, she is in love with Guero Davila, a Chicano pilot involved in shipping coca. When she suddenly receives a phone call telling her to run for her life, she does so, escaping through Mexico City into Spain, and then Morocco. Putting her knowledge of drug transportation to work by involving herself in hash-running between Morocco and Spain, she ends up with a short jail sentence but an important friendship with another inmate, Patty O'Farrell, the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Spanish family. When they are released, they set up a big-time drug trafficking business, with Teresa running the show and becoming, eventually, the person with whom everyone in the business must deal.

Teresa's story is not told in linear fashion. An unnamed speaker/narrator, presumably Perez-Reverte himself, has come to Sinaloa to investigate and describe Teresa Mendoza's life and business. Interviewing everyone with any information, he inserts himself and his interviews into the narrative. Soon the line begins to blur between fiction and fact, since some of the people he interviews, such as the three people to whom he dedicates the novel, are, in fact, real people who are included as characters in the novel. These add depth and a fine sense of realism to the novel.

Although Teresa Mendoza is not a character with whom the reader will identify, the author develops a certain amount of sympathy for her. Teresa is an entrepreneur of great intelligence, and this, combined with her ability to avoid creating any sort of trail that will implicate her legally, keeps her going in her dog-eat-dog world. The novel is episodic but fast paced, despite the sometimes unwelcome intrusions of the narrator/speaker, and Perez-Reverte succeeds in presenting a broad, intriguing picture of the business of drug smuggling and those who make it their careers. Mary Whipple

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "This is not happening to me, she thought", December 28, 2004

By	Sebastian Fernandez (Tampa, Florida United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Queen of the South (Hardcover)

I remember reading an article in the New York Times a little while ago in which a writer said that he decided whether or not to read a book based on the first sentence. He would continue reading only if he was hooked by this small sample. When I started reading this novel I thought to myself that Perez-Reverte must be of similar beliefs. The start of this work is so strong that it is hard to put it down after reading its first sentence, "The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die".

The phone call Teresa Mendoza receives is a signal that Guero Davila, her lover, is dead and that she needs to run away. Thus starts a spectacular adventure full of twists and turns that will have the reader looking forward to the next development every step of the way. Guero was a drug dealer that was betraying his bosses, so when they discovered him, he was murdered and they proceeded to go after Teresa.

An anonymous writer who is doing research and writing a book on the life of this mysterious woman tells part of the story. As usual, Perez-Reverte goes back and forth in the story, mixing elements from different time periods relating to the main character's life. In this case, we soon learn that the writer meets Teresa twelve years after Guero's death when she is involved in a difficult situation with the Federales in Culiacan, Mexico. Therefore, the author is letting us know that the ending may be in line with his usual pattern: bitter-sweet.

After that interlude, Perez-Reverte goes back to the moment in which Teresa is forced to run and we are taken along in a magnificent roller-coaster ride that will show us how this character changes and evolves, fighting with her destiny and trying to survive. The author's great writing skills help in making us feel as if we were right in the middle of the action, and we find ourselves rooting for a woman that ends up involved in the world of drugs. Perez-Reverte also does a very good job in describing settings and people in places like Mexico and the US, immersing the reader in the ambiance of these locations.

As to our main character, one thing is certain, Teresa learned her lesson from her experience with Guero, and now she decides to take control of her life: "She was never going to wait for anybody again, watching telenovelas in some house in some city somewhere". This is the essence behind this main character, and whether you like the book or not will depend on how much you like Teresa, a strong and focused woman, who takes life as it was dealt to her and who has a significant amount of inner conflicts. As far as I am concerned, this character has enough interest by itself so as to make this one of the best books of 2004.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Corrido of The Mexicana, March 21, 2006

By	M. T. Campos "LocalPeanut" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Queen of the South (Paperback)

I have read every Perez-Reverte novel . . . because he brought to life the worlds of antiquarian books, paintings, old fencing masters, chess, crumbling churches and treasure maps. All except one -- The Queen of the South. I balked because it was about drug running-- a subject I have never been interested in. (I think the closest I got to anything related to recreational drugs was growing a "false aralia" houseplant at work and fooling people into thinking I was growing "weed" right in front of the boss.)

It was months after it came out when I finally decided to pick it up. (My problem, as a reader, is that I ALWAYS FINISH a book, no matter how bad or boring it is. Because I was never going to let the 8 bucks I spent on it -- go to waste.) So I was afraid I was going to be stuck with a book that would put me to sleep for weeks. I was WRONG.

Arturo Perez-Reverte has done it again! He has enthralled me with the story of Teresa Mendoza. She starts out as the girlfriend of Guero Davila, a small plane pilot who flew drug shipments between Colombia and the U.S. He is killed (in flashback) and her story begins when she flees Sinaloa.

Reverte's writing is riveting. He tells of her incredible rise in the world of drug trafficking . . . she finds love (of sorts)again with Santiago, a boat driver; fate, Edmond Dantes and a lost "treasure" finds her in the form of a wealthy prison inmate, Patty O'Farrell. Teresa leverages her new-found wealth into power among the drug traffickers. And there's more betrayal and tragedy. It just doesn't stop. Not a dull moment!

There's a subtle parallel to the novel called The Count of Monte Cristo but not much because while the Monte Cristo book is almost entirely about revenge, Teresa's story will end with a "settling of debts." In the most spectacular fashion.

I got particularly attached to her bodyguard--- Pote Galvez whose fate was almost poetic and gut-wrenching and a 3-hanky event.

Read the Song of Teresa! You won't regret it. I found myself using the colorful phrases that Teresa used . . . while I was reading. (Although I recommend not muttering it during a staff meeting. Thankfully my boss only knows German.)