Seven Spanish Angels by Stephen Graham Jones

Life isn’t easy in El Paso, Texas. Neither is death. Caught between them is crime-scene tech in-training Marta Villarreal, trying to work a case that may very well be her last. And she’s having to work it without her assigned homicide escort, who’s also kind of her boyfriend, and would look a lot more innocent if he would just come in, answer some questions about all these dead girls. Have the Juarez murders come north of the border now, or is it a copycat?
And, why these women, why now? For as long as Marta can remember, the El Paso sun has baked the ground into a hard shell, so the dead can’t climb out. Not this week, though. This week the dead are all over town. And Marta may be among them.

*****

“The book masterfully plays with the serial killer genre, walking a line between convention and invention and delving into the psychology of both killer and detective. The plot is chilling in itself, but Jones’s brisk, clean, visceral prose gives the novel its edgy suspense.” –Publisher’s Weekly [for ATBS]

“…it does what crime drama is supposed to do: scare the bejesus out of the reader. Eerie and engrossing, the novel is the sort of thing you have to shake out of your system when you’ve finished, but like a train ride through hell, you can’t get off until it gets to a station.” —San Antonio Express [for ATBS]

*****

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of seven novels and two collections, most recently the Stoker finalist THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY and the Colorado Book Award finalist IT CAME FROM DEL RIO. And he’s he’s got five or six books coming over the next three years. Jones has been an NEA Fellow, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, and has won an Independent Publishers Award.

To learn more about Stephen, please visit his website.