A mediocre matrimonial scammer down to his last peso meets his match when he tries to con a hardened spinster in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Intrigue. In 1943 Mexico City, Ulises Linares is a floundering 29-year-old con man with silver just beginning to line his locks. Handsome and slick, but far less than savvy, he inherited some of his father’s trickster talents but not enough, and three years after his father’s death, he’s down on his luck, behind on the rent and barely able to pay for his next meal after a disastrous con involving a widow with several vengeful sons. So he sets his sights on finding the next big score and targets a wealthy spinster in a small mountainside town in Veracruz. But these plans also go off the rails due to familial complications when he becomes entangled with Inés, the niece of his latest intended.
The twists of lust and betrayal are enticing, but it’s Moreno-Garcia’s tart, clear-eyed social observation and unforgettable writing that make the novel sing. In noir, everyone has an angle, but they also have foolish desires and vulnerable soft spots. Moreno-Garcia gorgeously and unsparingly captures these gray areas of the soul. The Intrigue’s renderings of human desperation are top-tier, and no one is safe from the writer’s scythe. Characterizations are frequently ironic and brutal—Ulises “had his father’s seductive eyes, but he’d been spared his wit.”—and yet these figures are also deeply human. Ulises’ unsympathetic target, Perla, advertised herself as “a godly, serious woman” seeking a “reliable, thoughtful gentleman for correspondence and friendship.” In truth, Perla is a prideful woman and pitiless landlord who exploits her niece, but she is also nursing her own pain, which Moreno-Garcia renders palpably on the page. Perla “was unsure what she wanted. The yearning in her heart was a putrefied wound.”
Elevating the novel further, Moreno-Garcia captures the social context and inconvenient truths of 1940s Mexico, all with the same ruthless yet artful eye that she casts on the crimes and trespasses that propel the narrative. The Intrigue more than lives up to its title.