Hot
Detective Emilia Cruz Series Book 8
A personal message from the author:
I write about people who face hard things like discrimination, violence, and deception. Detective Emilia Cruz, Acapulco’s first female police detective, confronts drug cartels, official corruption and Mexico’s famous culture of “machismo.” Luckily, she’s found someone to stand and fight beside her.
When Felix Contreras, the host of NPR’s ALT.Latino show asked me about the Emilia Cruz character, I told him that she represented hope. Despite Mexico’s drug cartels and high murder rates, there are still good people fighting the good fight.
But as a female and a cop in Mexico, Detective Emilia Cruz lives in a pressure cooker. It’s hard to know who she can trust and harder still to have a normal relationship when she’s immersed for so much of the time in a stew of paranoia and danger.
But Emilia is on a quest to find women who have gone missing amid the violence of Mexico’s drug war.
All too often, when I lived in Mexico, I saw newspaper advertisements with pictures of young women. The headlines were all the same: Disappeared.
Missing persons is the undercurrent of the Detective Emilia Cruz series. The official Mexican government count remains elusive, but most news outlets agree that at least 60,000 people have been killed or reported missing over the past decade due to drug cartel violence. More bodies are found every few months and few are held accountable. In the Cuidad Juarez area alone, over 340 women are still missing.
I hope you follow the series as Emilia searches for Acapulco’s missing women. If you were missing, she’d be looking for you, too.
— Carmen Amato
A bitter past drives Acapulco’s first female police detective into a Hollywood film starring lies and murder when she goes undercover to catch a killer. As the camera rolls, Detective Emilia Cruz will face her toughest case yet.
After witnessing the execution-style murder of a taxi driver, Emilia replaces him behind the wheel. Undercover with a false identity, her target is a shadowy gang extorting protection money from the upscale taxi service.
The homicide investigation is soon stuck in neutral. No one in Acapulco has heard of the gang. Yet the threat of another murder has all the drivers, including Emilia, scared to death.
When Emilia’s worst enemy gets into her taxi, both her life and the murder case accelerate out of control. Next stop, a movie set.
The script is a nightmare.
The director’s cut is a double-cross.
The leading man has looks that could kill.