Review: 'The Intrigue' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Del Rey
Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters in order to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won’t last forever, and he’s desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.
He thinks he’s found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn’t expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.
When Inés discovers Ulises’s true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast, and clean. But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained for. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.
Venture into the streets of a small town where a patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.
All kinds of influences come together in The Intrigue in a way that makes it both very rich but also still its own thing. It is a kind of noir novel, full of cigarette smoke and sips of brandy. It is also deeply influenced by novels known as novelas costumbristas, as Silvia Moreno-Garcia explains in the Notes at the end of the book. These are novels which depict, but crucially also question and analyse, the customs or traditions of a society. In The Intrigue, Moreno-Garcia takes a very sharp scalpel to the mores and oddities of Puerco Ahogado, an imagined town in Veracruz. Add to that a love for telenovelas and we get a delightfully sticky tale of all kinds of things gone rotten. Moreno-Garcia has emphasised that this should not be tagged as Gothic on Goodreads, since it is not technically a Gothic novel. No supernatural elements here, as we might expect from her other books. And yet... I feel some Gothic vibes, specifically elements of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë which, despite its lack of ghosts, is distinctly Gothic in nature. While many think of the Gothic as definitively paranormal, the genre is just as marked by its engagement with and haunting by the past itself. If ever there were characters who are burdened by the past, tied down by ancestral and familial dictums, chained to a piece of land they'd rather leave behind, then it is the people in The Intrigue. So, to honour Moreno-Garcia's request, I'm not going to tag this as Gothic, but I would recommend lovers of the Gothic to give it a try.
Ulises is running out of money, and probably goodwill, so he singles out his next con target: Perla. Ulises hops on a train and makes his way to her village, where she runs a boardinghouse from her family's old ancestral mansion. But not all is as it seemed in Perla's letters. She is not easily fooled by romantic gestures and on top of that she has a niece, Inés, who catches on to him pretty quickly. But it turns out Inés also has her issues and perhaps, in joining forces with Ulises, she too can gain what she wants most. Told through the perspectives of Ulises, Inés, and Perla, The Intrigue weaves a web of lust and vice, long-harboured secrets and hidden shame, power and vulnerability. We spend a lot of time with Ulises initially, as he is our introduction to Perla and Inés, before we then get to hear from the women as well. I adored Inés pretty much straightaway and even Ulises is charming in how lost he is, even though he scams women. Perla is a tough nut to crack but what I really like is that Moreno-Garcia manages to strike that difficult balance of letting her be cruel but also letting us see the woman behind that. As we see Perla's memories, we come to understand why she is how she is, but we also get to see that she has no interest in being any other way. She could be better, kinder, less of a hypocrite, but she chooses not to. It is a difficult kind of character to nail, just as it is difficult to make me like a man who scams women, but if anyone could have done it, it was apparently Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a stunning writer, whether it's her imagery, the character work she does, setting, atmosphere, I just feel like she nails it consistently. Pretty much every book I've read by her I've enjoyed immensely and the same is true for The Intrigue. Like I mentioned up above, I'm amazed she had me as invested in Ulises and as understanding for Perla as I was in the end. I loved Inés from the start though, our caged bird who longs to be free, and I would still say that although The Intrigue begins with Ulises, the book is really about her. What I also liked a lot about this novel was its questionable morality. Now, important critical reading reminder: an author is not their character, is not their narrator, is not their novel. None of this is to do with Moreno-Garcia, except that she has the craft to depict it. But what I loved about The Intrigue was that it gave us a world that is cruel and capricious, in which people take advantage of and hurt one another, but it is also a world full of small kindnesses, if you know where to look. It is also a world in which victory looks like trying to get away with murder or robbing a spinster. I do feel like our fiction is too clean sometimes, with "villains" who literally wouldn't hurt a fly and would never even consider a true crime or misdeed. Give me characters and stories where people do have to look themselves in the mirror and admit they would go very far indeed to get what they want, even if they'll feel bad about to begin with. For those reasons alone, The Intrigue was great. That it is gorgeously written and great fun is why it is also superb.
I give this novel...
5 Universes!
I had a great time with The Intrigue, which is beautiful and dirty at the same time. I have enjoyed Moreno-Garcia's more paranormal novels, but I love how she leaves the paranormal behind here and creates a very specific image of humanity itself at its best and worst.
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