Untamed Shore

One

The beach smelled of death. Half a dozen sharks lay under the sun, waiting to be salted. Whenever Viridiana saw them, glistening belly-up in the midday heat, they reminded her of dominoes set upon a table before the game begins.

An angry shark can bite through tin and metal, the locals said; it could cut through the boats they took out to sea. And looking at the jaws hanging from the wooden rack, Viridiana might concur. But she liked the sharks, she even liked the stench of their livers roasting on a fire. It was a bitter, foul smell, but she had pleasant memories of her father cooking it, attempting to extract oil. He d done things like that when she was young, trying to make himself comfortable in Desengaño, to leave his city roots behind. He eventually stopped. It was obvious he was a city boy, with his books and his diploma from the university under his arm, and no amount of shoving a shark s liver across a pan was going to make him a fisherman. Besides, there was no point in trying to master the nets and the boats, anyway, since sharks were almost worthless.

Once upon a time, during World War II, fishermen could make a fortune selling shark livers, and many a fool in search of quick cash had steered his boat towards Baja California. Synthetic vitamins had killed that business. In Desengaño, stubborn fishermen still dragged the sharks out of the water, but many others dedicated themselves to hauling shrimp or an assortment of fish. The ones left chasing sharks sold them to merchants who inevitably passed them off as valuable cod fillets. No one would pay more than a pittance for shark meat, but shark meat wrapped in plastic and advertised as genuine Norwegian cod was worth the effort. Not that this helped the fishermen, since they sold the meat for a peso while the merchant sold it for fifteen in the city.

But people had to make a living.

Shark skin was sold to make boots, and the fishermen hung the sharks large jaws from a wooden

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Great Gatsby meets Night of the Iguana in this elegantly spare and darkly twisted story of undercurrents, deception, and colliding cultures. Rich in atmosphere and sinister in tone . . . a haunting lesson in the dangers of desire and the illusion of glamour and how dreams can be devoured by deceit. Hank Phillippi Ryan, author of The Murder List

Set in a small Baja town in the seedy 1970s, Silvia Moreno-Garcia s latest takes us into a world soaked in sunshine and secrets, where everyone is working an angle and the looming sense of menace builds with nearly each page-turn. A shrewd, exciting thriller. Julia Dahl, author of the award-winning Rebekah Roberts series