Mulholland
Published July 22, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
In a community on the edge of the poisoned, environmentally degraded Salton Sea in southern California, daughters have been disappearing. This haunted place is vividly brought to life in a novel that combines a thrilling plot, deeply developed characters, and a poetic evocation of the borderland. It’s a borderland in multiple senses: between Mexican, indigenous, and American heritages, between languages, between horror, thriller, and mystery genres, between everyday reality and the deeper truth of folklore. And it’s very, very good.
Malamar Veracruz, named by a vengeful, hateful mother, is a skilled butcher in the desert town of Valle that lies beside a saltwater inland sea that has been polluted, drained, and left to evaporate in the heat, now exploited for geothermal energy and lithium mining. Though once a popular resort destination, the shoreline now is littered with bones and poisonous dust, with mudpots and geysers bubbling up from the earth’s heat.
Many years ago, Mal’s sister Elena vanished, leaving her mother bereft and angry, seeming to hold Mal responsible for the absence of her favorite daughter. Now Mal is raising two daughters of her own, Griselda, a university student who is dating the son of the wealthy Anglo family that owns all of the land nearby, and teenager Amaranta. She tries to be a good mother, though she keeps secrets from them, including who their father is. As it turns out, she isn’t the only one in her family with secrets.
When a young coworker at the carnicería disappears, like other young women before her, Mal is unsettled, wondering why so many women vanish from this haunted place. Some suspect Gus, who searches the shoreline for the bones of his vanished daughter, is responsible for all of the desaparecidos. Before she can figure it out, the crisis comes much closer to home.
While Mal searches for answers, she keeps encountering La Siguanaba, a monstrous figure from a local folktale who Mal first encountered when her sister disappeared. The creature is a beautiful seductive woman, with midnight-black hair, until she turns: she has the head of a horse, with glowing red eyes. Why is this legendary figure pursuing her, and is it somehow responsible for the way so many daughters are taken?
Threaded throughout the story is an exploration of mothers and daughters, of inherited trauma, of environmental injustice and the dispossession of the original inhabitants of this extraordinary place and the natural world it once supported. The characters speak a mix of English and Spanish, bringing mestizo culture to the page and infusing the narrative with an unapologetic flavor of the borderlands. Without sacrificing pacing or raw emotion, the narrative is full of arresting images and starling wordplay. The plot, too, is cleverly unfolded, all the clues in plain view but only assembled as the pieces click together. All in all, this novel is a tour de force of storytelling and an extraordinary work of crime fiction.