No place to bury the dead A novel

Venezuelan writer Sainz Borgo (It Would Be Night in Caracas) serves up a rich and lyrical tale of desperation and redemption, set during an outbreak of a plague that causes amnesia. Angustias Romero's twin baby sons have died. Her husband, Salveiro, lacking the funds for a proper burial, is content to leave the bodies in the morgue, while Angustias, evoking the plight of Sophocles's Antigone, determines to provide the twins with a proper resting place. She turns to a squatter named Visitación Salazar, who runs an illegal cemetery on a plot owned by "corrupt thug" Alcides Abundio. Mezquite, the site of Visitación's cemetery, is a lawless border town controlled by Alcides, who terrorizes the residents with the mayor's complicity. As Alcides mounts a violent campaign to seize the cemetery from Visitación and those like Angustias who support Visitación in exchange for free burials, the novel morphs into an exciting crime thriller. The mysterious plague adds to the intrigue and the tension, breaking down trust between Angustias and the taciturn Salveiro, as she worries he's become infected. Throughout, Sainz Borgo applies stark poetry to the terrifying setting, where "moans and cries attributed to ghosts sometimes masked executions and beatings." It's a stunner. (Dec.)

Three women negotiate death, birth, and loss in a violent landscape. Sainz Borgo's second novel is set in a country where (as the title suggests) a cemetery is contested land. The so-called Third Country is administered by a sharp-edged, dark-humored woman named Visitación Salazar, who handles the numerous deaths caused by a plague and a brutal cartel. Angustias, who is directed to Visitación when her twin infant sons die from the plague, is soon drawn into her long-running feud with Abundio, the regional cartel leader, who resents Visitación's fiefdom and her knack for avoiding his thugs. Angustias, whose husband left her after the twins' deaths and has few money-making options, finds a safe haven in the cemetery, where she cares for both the corpses and others seeking sanctuary, like Jairo, a musician who writes folk tunes about the region, and Consuelo, a barmaid who's pregnant and escaping her abusive partner. Sainz Borgo (who was born in Venezuela and now lives in Spain) alternates between third-person narration and Angustias' point of view, but in either case the mood is mordant and threatening ("Angustias" is Spanish for "anguish"), defined by clipped, terse sentences. That approach highlights the brutality of the environment, though it sacrifices precision--the roots of Visitación's role as a cemetery caretaker aren't clear, and the occasional magical-realist touches (Visitación has a constant "plague halo" of wasps above her head) are too passing to register deeply. Subplots involving Abundio's power struggles with a local mayor and sicarios are similarly broad-brush. But it succeeds as a study of grief and the urge to create spaces fit to contemplate loss. "I was only interested in keeping alive my memories of the babies I loved," Angustias thinks, and Sainz Borgo suggests that the rituals of burial are essential to valuing life. Stark, intimate, and melancholy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.