Imagine if you were the first and only female police detective in Acapulco. Cartels and corruption are everywhere. Life gets cheaper every day. You discover murder victims sacrificed to Santa Muerte, Mexico’s forbidden saint of death. Other bodies swing from billboards. Will you investigate? Or be cursed? In the remote Coyuca Lagoon reserve, Detective Emilia Cruz Emilia and her partner Franco … Or be cursed?
In the remote Coyuca Lagoon reserve, Detective Emilia Cruz Emilia and her partner Franco Silvio find an elaborate altar to Santa Muerte next to the body of a known gang member. Prayers to the so-called Skeleton Saint send a warning to the death saint’s enemies.
Gang warfare quickly sweeps across Acapulco. Mutilated bodies, public messages, and more altars panic the city.
The police investigation is soon a maze of unholy clues. At the same time, everyone close to Emilia has a brush with death. Bad luck? Or is the Skeleton Saint’s curse coming true?
From a beachfront hostel to a voodoo market, the more Emilia discovers, the worse things get. When she goes undercover as a Santa Muerte worshipper on the eve of the Day of the Dead, her life will be stripped of everything she holds dear.
Her family.
Her lover.
Her job.
Her soul.
“Carmen Amato has created a compelling, complex, well-rounded and durable character . . . PACIFIC REAPER is a great read — and a great reason to pick up the other books in Amato’s Emilia Cruz series.” – Jim Nesbitt, author of the Ed Earl Burch detective series.
“The mystery could certainly send a thrill to crime-loving aficionados.” – Latina Book Club
Get all the DETECTIVE EMILIA CRUZ books:
Cliff Diver
Hat Dance
Diablo Nights
King Peso
Pacific Reaper
43 Missing
Made in Acapulco
more
Really, really great. The series just does not slow down. Grab you copy, it’s really good.
I read novels for entertainment and author Amato did not disappoint me. A story of personal courage and dedication, fused with mystery, murders and suspense. Amato, through Emilia Cruz, her main character, has an uncanny ability to draw you into the underworld of ritualistic murders and crimes. Her characters come to life in this page turner, putting the reader on the scene. Her locations are superbly described and vivid. You are there and your part of the suspense. My plan was to take my time and enjoy the novel, however, Carmen Amato was having none of that —she made me read through this fast-moving novel. Highly recommended.
Acapulco detective Emilia Cruz has one stylish foot poised in the opulent comfort of one of her city’s luxury hotels, a beach-front high-rise run by her boyfriend Kurt. The other is mired in the hyper-violent world of a cop trying to solve murders in a Mexico ruled and riven by rival drug cartels and corrupt politicians and fellow officers.
Cruz is the only female detective in a squad room of uber-macho males, some of them corrupt, some of them openly contemptuous of her and blatant with crude commentary and sexual come-ons. She’s tough and gives as good as she gets, but doesn’t get caught up in a game of trying to out-macho the machos.
Instead, author Carmen Amato has created a compelling, complex, well-rounded and durable character for the fifth book in the series, PACIFIC REAPER. As in Grim Reaper. As in a damn good whodunit that has Cruz and her tough-guy partner, Franco Silvio, on the trail of a murderous drug gang known as El Machete warring with a Santa Muerte cult that has some nasty criminal sidelines.
Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is a syncretic folk religion that borrows from Catholicism and Aztec religious beliefs. The Death Goddess is strongly tied to the Day of the Dead tradition and its reverence for departed family members and ancestors. It is also the fastest-growing folk religion in Mexico, popular with the poor, outlaws and outcasts.
The action starts with the discovery of a beheaded El Machete member in a bloody tent pitched near a run-down beach hostel, the body surrounded by Santa Muerte images, muertos figurines and talismans. With its overt cult overtones, the grisly murder spooks Cruz and even shakes Silvio’s hard-guy façade. This gruesome scene is matched by bodies found hanging upside down from billboards along the city’s major thoroughfares, seemingly a tit-for-tat exchange between El Machete and the Santa Muerte crew.
Cruz and Silvio catch the killer not long after finding the beheaded body. He’s the son of a prominent and corrupt Mexico City politician, missing for months from an exclusive boarding school. He dies in his jail cell from a pre-existing medical condition, casting suspicion on Cruz and Silvio and leaving them with the unanswered question of how a prep-school rich kid wound up being a Santa Muerte cult killer.
The Santa Muerte angle is fascinating stuff, providing well-researched passages that give an added dimension to gangland killings. Amato, who clearly knows Mexico and its rich and multi-faceted history and culture, handles the material with discipline and an eye to keeping the story on-track.
The author also strikes a nice balance in showing other aspects of Cruz’s life — her relationship with Kurt and the luxurious life they share and the difficulties dealing her mother, a traumatized soul shattered by the long-ago death of her husband and Cruz’s father. These may seem like side stories, but Amato deftly ties them back to the murder case and the end-game revelation of a dark family secret that leaves Cruz battered and questioning her own identity.
PACIFIC REAPER is a great read — and a great reason to pick up the other books in Amato’s Emilia Cruz series.
Jim Nesbitt is the author of three hard-boiled Texas crime thrillers, The Right Wrong Number, The Last Second Chance and The Best Lousy Choice. All three are available in paperback or Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/author/jimnesbitt