A Death in Mexico

Brutal as the kick of raw mescal, the first novel from Woods (the short fiction collection Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem) depicts a nightmarish drug-ridden modern Mexico, where corruption and sadism lie in wait for unwary Americans like artist’s model Amanda Smallwood, found with her neck broken and eyes gouged out at 2 a.m. on a San Miguel de Allende street. Certain that the police, through bribes and moral decay, are losing the war on crime, Insp. Hector Diaz, wracked by cigarettes, heavy drinking, and intestinal upheavals, nonetheless relentlessly pursues Amanda’s killer, hoping that a moment of justice may redeem his own soul. Though occasionally jolted by Woods’s evident addiction to inept similes (“Sodden cotton draped over [a corpse’s] bare buttocks like the final curtain of a Greek tragedy”), the author’s message in this powerful but uneven parable could not be clearer: never go to Mexico. (May)