Death Takes Me

A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025

A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025

‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times
‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME
‘Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory’ Layla Martinez

A city is always a cemetery.

When a professor named Cristina 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 main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of violence spreading throughout the city.

A dark and dazzling literary thriller that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, Death Takes Me explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of gender and violence, death and desire.

Translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers