Death Takes Me

A Novel

De: Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers - translator, Sarah Booker - translator

Narrado por: Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, Fabiola Stevenson, Carlotta Brentan, Mark Sanderlin, Victoria Villarreal

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence.

“Deeply rewarding . . . a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . [a] harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, The AV Club

A city is always a cemetery.

A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”

The professor becomes the first informant on the case, which is led by a detective newly obsessed with poetry and trailed by a long list of failures. But what has the professor really seen? As the bodies of more castrated men are found alongside lines of verse, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems to put a stop to the violence spreading throughout the city.

Originally written in Spanish, where the word “victim” is always feminine, Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative of gendered violence on its head. As sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims, it unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor’s classroom and through the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art in an imaginative exploration of the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

©2025 Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers, Sarah Booker (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“[A] deeply rewarding experience . . . dense and elliptical, a dreamscape with a powerful undertow . . . Rivera Garza does not follow the conventions of the mystery narrative, the narrowing of a multitude of names to one. Instead, the novel [grows] increasingly expansive as the strictures around identity grow looser and looser, encompassing more and more. In this harrowing and labyrinthine masterpiece, Rivera Garza ultimately goes one step further, unsettlingly implicating readers themselves.”—Katie Kitamura, The New York Times

“Death Takes Me puts a subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story.”—Time, “Most Anticipated Books of 2025”

“Cristina Rivera Garza’s writing rewires your brain, summoning the ghosts of vivid emotions you’d forgotten you could even feel.”—Esquire

So confusing

Hard to follow the storyline. The poetry is nice but never did understand who the killer was.

boring, long and tedious.

no substance, incredibly boring. I read Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Tolstoy, how did this ever win a Pulitzer?