From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Liliana's Invincible Summer, a dreamlike, genre-defying novel about a professor and detective seeking justice in a world suffused with gendered violence. When a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning scrawled on the brick wall beside the body, written 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 lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? As more bodies of more men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and put a stop to the stream of violence spreading throughout the city. Death Takes Me is a thrilling masterpiece of literary fiction that flips the traditional crime narrative on its head, set in an all-too-familiar world where death is rampant and violence is gendered. Written in sentences as sharp as the cuts on the bodies of the victims--a word which, in Spanish, is always feminine-- Death Takes Me unfolds with the charged logic of a dream, moving from the police station to the professor's classroom and into the slippery worlds of Latin American poetry and art, as it explores with masterful imagination the unstable terrains of desire and sexuality.