Death Takes Me

By: Cristina Rivera Garza, Sarah Booker - translation, Robin Myers - translation

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

Bloomsbury presents Death Takes Me by Cristina Rivera Garza, read by Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, Fabiola Stevenson, Carlotta Brentan, Mark Sanderlin, and Victoria Villarreal.

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ‘Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.’

After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? While more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

From one of Mexico’s greatest living writers, Death Takes Me is a dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, in a world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Unfolding with the charged logic of a dream in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims – a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine – it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.

©2025 Cristina Rivera Garza (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

Rivera Garza’s dazzling prose here becomes sharper than ever … Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory, Death Takes Me lingers inside your brain long after you’ve read it (Layla Martínez)

An extraordinary, fiercely imaginative novel, written with the precision of a true master of her craft … I couldn’t put it down (Juan Gómez-Jurado)