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Death Takes Me

A Novel

Author Cristina Rivera Garza
Translated by Robin Myers, Sarah Booker
Hardcover
$28.00 US
Random House Group | Hogarth
5-1/2"W x 8-1/4"H
On sale Feb 25, 2025 | 320 Pages | 9780593737002
Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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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.

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.
© Marta Calvo
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome, The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. View titles by Cristina Rivera Garza
Praise for Death Takes Me

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

“[An] unforgettable literary puzzle . . . seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review


Praise for Cristina Rivera Garza

“Cristina Rivera Garza is a writer of startling luminosity.”—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“One of the most fiercely original literary voices from Latin America.”—Ignacio M. Saìnchez Prado, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. She is an insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language.”—Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red

“To read Rivera Garza’s work is to experience a visceral relationship with the written word.”—Sightlines

“Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons

“In writing about Mexican violence, misogyny, natural disasters, pandemics, art and literature, resistance, about Mexican women, US Latinx, and about herself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes about the universal conditions of our world today. She does so with prose unmatched for its sharp intelligence, poetry, clarity, empathy, liveliness, passion. She is a genius, ‘our’ necessary voice.”—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle

About

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.

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.

Author

© Marta Calvo
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome, The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston. View titles by Cristina Rivera Garza

Praise

Praise for Death Takes Me

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

“[An] unforgettable literary puzzle . . . seamlessly conveyed in Rivera Garza’s incisive and poetic style. Life and literature become one in this singular achievement.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review


Praise for Cristina Rivera Garza

“Cristina Rivera Garza is a writer of startling luminosity.”—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“One of the most fiercely original literary voices from Latin America.”—Ignacio M. Saìnchez Prado, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Cristina Rivera Garza is an explosive writer yet to be fully accounted for in English. She is an insubordinate stylist, a skilled creator of atmospheric and haunting language.”—Lina Meruane, author of Seeing Red

“To read Rivera Garza’s work is to experience a visceral relationship with the written word.”—Sightlines

“Cristina Rivera Garza does not respect what is expected of a writer, of a novel, of language. She is an agitator.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Kingdom Cons

“In writing about Mexican violence, misogyny, natural disasters, pandemics, art and literature, resistance, about Mexican women, US Latinx, and about herself, Cristina Rivera Garza writes about the universal conditions of our world today. She does so with prose unmatched for its sharp intelligence, poetry, clarity, empathy, liveliness, passion. She is a genius, ‘our’ necessary voice.”—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle

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