#000499
The Queen of the South
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
First published in Spanish as *La Reina del Sur* in 2002, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel traces the rise of Teresa Mendoza from the girlfriend of a Sinaloa drug pilot — fleeing hitmen the night he is murdered — to a hashish smuggler running boats across the Strait of Gibraltar and, finally, a cool and calculating narco boss on Spain's southern coast. Pérez-Reverte frames her twelve-year ascent through a journalist-narrator piecing the legend together, threading in the narcocorridos that mythologize figures like her. It's a literary thriller with a hard documentary sheen — the machinery of trafficking rendered with reporter's precision — and a study of a woman who survives by out-thinking men who keep underestimating her. It later spawned a hit Telemundo telenovela and the USA Network series *Queen of the South*.
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The author
Arturo Pérez-Reverte (born 1951, Cartagena) spent some two decades as a war correspondent before turning to fiction full time. A member of the Royal Spanish Academy, he is best known abroad for The Club Dumas and The Flanders Panel and, in Spain, for the swashbuckling Captain Alatriste series. His journalism shows in the researched, unsentimental texture of his novels.
The book
For The Queen of the South Pérez-Reverte reported among the drug worlds of Sinaloa and the Campo de Gibraltar. The framing conceit — a writer reconstructing Teresa's story from interviews and gaps — lets the myth and the woman sit uneasily side by side.
How it reads
Critics admired the momentum and the rare spectacle of a female crime lord rendered without sentimentality, though some found Teresa opaque by design. Andrew Hurley's English translation appeared in 2004; the two television adaptations have since eclipsed the book for many readers.
For more context
Read it as part of the wider narco-literature boom, and listen to the corrido "La Reina del Sur" that helped inspire it.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte
- Publisher
- G. P. Putnam's Sons
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2002
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado
Places