Lupita liked to iron

"Ironing quieted her thoughts, restored her sanity,
as if smoothing out wrinkles was her way of fixing the world."

Everything changes for Lupita—a police officer, not particularly attractive, alcoholic, abused—the afternoon that lawyer Larreaga is murdered on the corner of Aldama and Ayuntamiento. Just a few seconds, a greeting exchanged between them, and a trail of blood confirming there's a corpse.

She is the only witness and is incapable of remembering; she feels paralyzed by fear and discovers with horror that she has urinated in her pants. Disconcerted and lost, devastated by the death of someone who for her offered a new possibility in a corrupt world, full of drugs and inequalities, she decides to take justice into her own hands and solve this mysterious crime surrounded by dark political interests, corruption networks, and drug trafficking.

The Mexican writer Laura Esquivel, author of the contemporary classic Like Water for Chocolate, displaying a language full of orality and legend, black humor and spirituality, recreates the story of an exceptional woman, a character opposed to the archetypal conception of a heroine who will be etched in the readers' memory. A survivor of a society marked by centuries of injustice in which power, appearances, money reign... where there seems to be no way out.

A fascinating parable of this world in crisis that has lost its way, where almost all of us are a bit like Lupita and seek something that saves us from lovelessness. An essential novel.