The Queen of the South

Teresa Mendoza is a young woman in Culiacan, Sinaloa, living quietly as the girlfriend of a cartel pilot until a phone call warns her he is dead and she has minutes to run. What follows is a rise from fugitive to prisoner to trafficking legend. Teresa crosses to southern Spain, learns the smuggling routes of the Strait of Gibraltar, survives a Spanish prison, and builds a transatlantic drug operation that makes her the most powerful narco on two continents. Perez-Reverte frames the book as a journalist reconstructing her legend from the narco-ballads sung about her, mixing hard operational detail with the mythology the drug world builds around its own.