Mystery Ahead 13 Apr 2025 😎 Double Trouble | True Story | MIDNIGHT AND BLUE
Carlota vs Claudia, plus Rebus in jail
Top secrets, exclusive excerpts and reviews of must-read mysteries every other Sunday from author Carmen Amato. Find more at carmenamato.net/links.
#topsecret
Double Trouble
Carlota Montoya Perez, the fictional mayor of Acapulco in the Detective Emilia Cruz series, was “born” long before Claudia Sheinbaum became president of Mexico last year. (That’s her official presidential portrait.)
Yet the two women, one fictional and one real, are strikingly similar.
They both wear their hair in the sleek ponytail popular with upper class Mexican woman.
They both wear classic skirt suits, although Sheinbaum also favors traditional Mexican embroidery.
They both embrace sports as a unifying vehicle.
Carlota wants to bring the Summer Olympics to Acapulco and has convinced Emilia’s significant other, hotel manager Kurt Rucker, to join the exploratory committee.
In real life, Claudia hosted a National Boxing Class in Mexico City’s Zócalo square to promote youth sports, drawing a reported 42,000 participants. The event was held simultaneously in public squares in every Mexican state, with a nationwide attendance of about 500,000, according to the president’s social media.
Both Carlota and Claudia are wildly popular. In BARRACUDA BAY, Carlota is re-elected to a second term. According to a poll conducted last month by the newspaper El Financiero, Claudia enjoys an 83% approval rating.
Finally, both Carlota and Claudia are grappling with the problem of organized crime and violence.
In the Detective Emilia Cruz books, Carlota is extremely self-motivated. She’s quite ruthless when it comes to her own power and prestige. For her, organized crime is viewed through that lens. If something makes her look bad, she’s against it. If it can be used to her advantage, well, there’s room for negotiation.
For example, did she take cartel money for her re-election campaign in BARRACUDA BAY?
You decide.
Back to reality. Claudia’s policy toward organized crime is still a work in progress, in my view. She inherited her predecessor’s “hugs not bullets” policy, which saw homicides skyrocket and the army take on a heightened law enforcement role. Now, fewer than one-third of poll respondents say she is doing a good job combating corruption and organized crime.
But in an unprecedented move, in February Claudia sent 29 drug cartel suspects to the US, including the man charged in the 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Not only did the handover bypass the glacial Mexican legal system, which generally fusses over extraditions as a threat to Mexican sovereignty (and tellingly Mexico City did not use the word extradition in this case), but the sheer logistical feat of moving so many cartel members without leaks to the bad guys was impressive and speaks of tighter control than in administrations past.
Moreover, Claudia has empowered her security chief, Omar García Harfuch, to create a civilian force under his direct command and take the military out of the security equation. The National Operations Unit will be staffed by veterans of the now-defunct Federal Police, where García Harfuch started his career before becoming Mexico City’s chief of police when Claudia was mayor.
So what’s next for the two leaders?
In fiction, Carlota wants Emilia to find the teen-aged cartel sicario who killed her sister.
In reality, Claudia wants to keep a “cool head” in the face of President Trump’s bluster.
Both women are definitely worth watching!
#excerpt
A true story . . .
“If the police show up, make sure you’re holding the package.”
The fellow CIA officer prepping me to meet a deep cover agent wasn’t trying to scare me, although he sure succeeded.
No, he was simply being practical. I was expendable. The source wasn’t.
Meeting a CIA source in a foreign country involved a head-spinning number of variables, not least of which were avoiding local cops and hostile intelligence services like those from China and Russia.
As my heart hammered, I memorized the details of the upcoming rendezvous. I’d been a CIA officer for 12 years, but meeting agents was never my job.
Keep reading the entire post “The Gift That Keeps on Giving,” on Debra Goldstein’s blog: https://www.debrahgoldstein.com/the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving-by-carmen-amato/
#review
MIDNIGHT AND BLUE by Ian Rankin
Over the years, Rankin has put his iconic Edinburgh police detective John Rebus through the wringer. In the latest, Rebus is 60-something and in jail for the murder of his longstanding frenemy, Morris Gerald Cafferty, one-time lord of the city’s criminal underworld. Rebus maintains that he only meant to frighten Cafferty when the man died of a heart attack. His appeal is pending.
Although a cop’s chances of surviving the general prison population are low, Rebus is his usual salty self. He enjoys the fragile protection of Darryl Christie who took over Cafferty’s crime operations but is doing a stretch in jail himself. Christie runs his criminal enterprise from his jail cell despite pressure from an outsider who is making a play for Christie’s territory.
With tensions already running high in the prison, an inmate is stabbed to death on Rebus’s cell block. Rebus’s former police colleagues are called in to investigate.
Did a guard do it? Or another inmate? No murder weapon, no blood anywhere.
At the same time, his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke is looking for a missing girl, eventually tracing her to a soft porn site run by a famous athlete with ties to the dead inmate.
Everything ultimately connects in Ian Rankin’s usual brilliant way.
Take your time reading because there are many characters in this book. Two separate police investigations, a score of prison inmates, prison guards, criminals on the outside running amok, the soft porn website bunch, etc.
All of the secondary characters from previous books are back, including Malcolm Fox, the driven detective who started out in Internal Affairs and is never as good at his job as he wants to be.
The most intriguing character in MIDNIGHT AND BLUE might be Darryl Christie. We first met him as an ambitious teen 7 books ago. He’s older and more cunning now. Jail is hardly a setback.
After this, I re-read STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE, the first book in which Christie appears. He’s a great foil to Rebus, younger and more calculating. He swims in and out of Cafferty’s dangerous wake as he takes control of Edinburgh’s underworld, making for a series-within-a-series.
Each Rebus-Christie book is better than the last. Here they are in order:
STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE
SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE
EVEN DOGS IN THE WILD
RATHER BE THE DEVIL
IN A HOUSE OF LIES
A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES
A HEART FULL OF HEADSTONES
MIDNIGHT AND BLUE
That’s it for this edition of Mystery Ahead. Thank you for spending this time with me.
Wishing you health, happiness, and more great reads.
All the best, Carmen
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I really enjoyed your parallels between Claudia and Carlotta were fascinating. Also loved your story in the field! Amazing, including the b-day wrapping. Good one, Carmen!
Another very interesting newsletter, Carmen. Your field exercise was absolutely intriguing. Did you ever learn what was in the gift-wrapped big box? Or is that info classified?