Death Takes Me

A NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025 A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR 2025 ''A labyrinthine masterpiece'' New York Times ''A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story'' TIME ''Obsessive, dreamlike and hallucinatory'' Layla Martinez A city is always a cemetery. When a professor named Cristina stumbles upon the corpse of a man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: ''Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.'' After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the main informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. As the bodies of more men are found, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the stream of