Velvet was the Night by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
When I first heard about Mexican Gothic and Velvet was the Night by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia I hurried out to buy both. The novels were set in Mexico, and were written by a Mexican author. I like all things Mexican, so why not? They got good reviews, too. I started with Mexican Gothic , and it was . . . just okay. I wished I hadn't, in my enthusiasm, bought two novels by an author who didn't, in the first work of hers I read, delight me. The good news is, though, that Velvet was the Night was delightful. It is, like Mexican Gothic , Moreno-Garcia's take on a genre: historical noir. I guess if I had to choose I'd always take noir over gothic, so maybe it's not a surprise that I preferred this account of Mexico in the 1970s, when the country was still under the heel of the repressive PRI. A young woman, activist-adjacent, disappears, and with her some photographs that will compromise that repressive government by showing their involvement in a recent riot. A street kid...