Synopses & Reviews
Seven Spanish Angels is a pitch-perfectly streamlined first-person crime novel that features the most engaging lead character to come out of a forensic crime lab since Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta.
After painstakingly building a career for herself as El Paso, Texas's, best crime-scene investigator, Marta Villareal is seven days and seven bodies away from retirement. She just doesn't know it yet. Day one begins with a bang. Her homicide detective partner has gone AWOL and she's called to the aftermath of an incendiary event-someone has literally blown up and the person and/or persons behind the explosion are just getting started. But she's also the primary on a baffling series of homicides across the border in Juarez, Mexico. And while scouring the bomb site for trace evidence, she gets called in to examine yet another Juarez-linked body. Only this one is discovered on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande. Alone and on the edge of a personal breakdown, she can look forward to series of postmortem discoveries the likes of which will haunt her for the rest of her days.
With metronomic suspense and precision characterization, Seven Spanish Angels solidifies Stephen Graham Jones's reputation as the next big thing to happen to crime fiction.
About the Author
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of All the Beautiful Sinners (Rugged Land 4/03), The Bird Is Gone (FC2, 8/03), and The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (FC2 9/00), which won the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. A recipient of a 2002 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Jones has published dozens of short stories in a wide variety of literary magazines, including Open City, Alaska Quarterly Review, Meridian, Georgetown Review, Cutbank, and Black Warrior Review. An assistant professor of English at Texas Tech University, Jones is a member of the Blackfeet Nation. He lives with his wife and two children in West Texas.