Long before he became a private detective, Ernesto Sánchez and his family fled Mexico City to escape the family business — moving cocaine for the cartels. As a teenager he adapted well to his new home in Canada. But adulthood brought some changes. Like shedding his birth gender and the name Cristina to become a tough cop with a five-o’clock shadow. Now Ernesto’s back in Mexico City, accepting cases from the comfort of his velvet settee in a dumpy apartment. At the urging of his mother, he agrees to find a young Canadian woman who has gone missing on Mexico’s crime-ridden Pacific Coast. Driven by a compulsion to address injustice, and a mounting panic that his life is in danger, Sánchez encounters cops on the take, shady gringos, a hungry alligator — and a dog named Bill Clinton. Mezcalero is the first book in the Detective Sánchez chronicles. Rich in detail, this is an absorbing tale that shines light into the dark corners of Mexico’s pervasive and devastating world of organized crime.

T.E. Wilson's profile page

T.E. Wilson’s work as a journalist and human rights observer in Latin America has taken him from post-conflict Guatemala to the mountains of the Sierra Madre and the depths of Mexico’s prison system. He attended McGill University, where he shared the Shapiro Award for creative writing. For his non-fiction writing he has received a CBC Canadian Literary Award (first) and a National Magazine Award (gold). Born in Montreal, Wilson resides in Peterborough, Ontario.