As a sheriff and his deputy patrol a deserted beach in , they stumble upon a washed up body. One look at the track marks on his arm and the death is ruled as another drug overdose. Emi Hernandez becomes just one of many young people to lose their lives in a heroin epidemic sweeping across the city. Inside Emi’s pocket, the police find a card depicting , the saint of death. The deputy dismisses the card as just “some Mexican gambling,” and the case is closed.
Two years later Lucia, Emi’s younger sister, is preparing to leave for Stanford University. Living in a motel with her mother, they are still grieving the loss of her brother when she finds the same card of Santa Muerte in their room's Bible. Mrs Hernandez, who is working long hours as a hotel maid to make ends meet, just wants her daughter to attend college and move on. Lucia has other ideas. When another motel guest, Javier, a mysterious former police detective, informs her of similar cases that were also suspiciously ruled suicides, she decides she has to stay in the city.
SR Stuart’s debut Mr Muerte is a gripping, dark adventure for readers who like to question the stories the world expects them to believe. Investigating Emi’s death sets off a chain reaction threatening to unmask a city-wide conspiracy involving the mayor, police force, church, and sinister criminal elements lurking beneath St Augustine’s surface.
Stuart's choice of setting pays off. Founded in 1565 by Spanish Conquistadors, St Augustine, is a character unto itself. While the old colonial architecture has long since blended into modern American culture—Lucia’s motel is not far from the Castillo de San Marcos, a seventeenth-century fort flanked by a massive car park and a Starbucks—there’s a nagging sense that the city is keeping secrets, a curiosity that keeps the pages turning.
The novel takes its time at the start, letting Lucia get her bearings as she steps into the role of investigator. One of her first attempts at finding someone linked to Emi is cold calling numbers from the yellow pages, hardly professional. In a genre dominated by ex-soldiers and detectives like Jack Reacher and Aaron Falk, centering a young, untested female protagonist heightened the stakes. As her curiosity and persistence quickly develop into a taste for danger, the pacing picks up.
There is, at points, a heavy reliance on exposition and monologuing to give Lucia the information she needs. She meets a cast of colourful characters in the course of her investigation including a priest, pageant queen, and a pair of fortune telling book sellers. Their backstories are compelling and keep the story moving, but Stuart occasionally takes an easy route in how Lucia uncovers the truth. Characters open up to her without much prompting.
Mr Muerte begins as a hunt for the face behind death’s mask but evolves into something far more chilling, a study of how power hides in plain sight, shared and sustained through a network of ordinary evil. Through all the twists and turns, opportunism, greed, lust, and fear all mix together to create a culture of silence which Lucia has to sift through. By the end, there is still a lingering doubt over where the centre of the city's problems lie and there is no single person she can point the finger at.
What starts as a murder mystery ends up being a reflection on the relationship between storytelling and death. The stories families and communities tell themselves to rationalise the death of loved ones intertwine with the stories crafted by those in power to keep people fearful and compliant. As Javier tells Lucia, “stories are more powerful than laws.”
Mr Muerte by Sean Stuart is out now on Amazon (Encour Press, $22)
