Some novels announce their menace with a scream. This one does it with a smile, a pressed linen suit, and a glass of sherry poured a little too early in the afternoon. The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia trades the haunted mansions and monsters of her earlier work for something more ordinary and, in its own way, far more unsettling: three people in a shabby boardinghouse, each certain they are the smartest liar in the room.
The Premise: A Con Man Arrives, and the House Bites Back
The year is 1943. Ulises is an aging charmer who works the lonely hearts columns of Mexican magazines, seducing solitary women by post and vanishing with whatever cash he can pry loose. Broke and rattled by wartime air-raid drills in Mexico City, he picks the cheaper of two train tickets and steps off in Puerco Ahogado, a fog-wrapped mountain town in Veracruz, to court Perla Inclán, a fortyish spinster who runs a faded guesthouse built on a coffee fortune that dried up decades ago.
His plan is simple. Marry the money, drain it, disappear. What he does not plan for is Inés, Perla’s niece, a seamstress with obsidian eyes and a knack for reading a man the way she reads a bolt of cloth. When Inés works out exactly what Ulises is, she does not raise the alarm. She asks for a cut. From that handshake forward, the novel becomes a slow, delicious tightening of a knot, because a guesthouse is a small world, and everyone in it is watching everyone else.
That setup is where the book earns its title. The plot of The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a nest of schemes folded inside schemes, and the pleasure lies in watching who miscalculates first.
The Characters: Nobody Here Is Innocent
Moreno-Garcia’s sharpest choice is refusing to hand you a hero. Each of the three leads is vain, wounded, and self-justifying, and each is rendered with enough interior life that you understand them even while you distrust them.
- Ulises is a wonderful creation, a man coasting on a fading face and his dead father’s rules for the small con. He believes himself a gentleman thief and keeps discovering he is neither as clever nor as cold as he pretends.
- Inés is the engine of the book. Caged, unpaid, treated as a servant with a surname, she carries a furious intelligence and a hunger for a life beyond the guesthouse walls. Her sardonic edge gives the prose its bite.
- Perla is the quiet triumph. She could have been a stock spinster. Instead she is proud, calculating, cruel, and pitiable, a woman shaped by a tyrant father and by choices she made to survive genteel poverty. The novel hands her a full past, told in vivid present-tense flashbacks, and those chapters may be the strongest writing in the whole book.
The supporting cast pulls its weight too. Nepomuceno, the drunken old professor who quotes Poe and Dante and became the closest thing Inés has to a father, is tender and funny. Cándido, the town lawyer forever circling Perla with legalistic marriage proposals, is odious in exactly the right measure.
The Setting: Decay You Can Smell
If you have read Mexican Gothic, you know Moreno-Garcia can make a house feel like a living antagonist, and she does it again here through accumulation rather than the supernatural. The Inclán guesthouse is all beeswax and moth-eaten carpets, chipped piano keys, a dry fountain choked with leaves, and butterflies pinned fading in their shadow boxes. Puerco Ahogado itself, perched on a volcanic slope and veiled in a permanent drizzle called the chipichipi, becomes a character: humid, gossipy, class-obsessed, beautiful, and quietly suffocating.
The period detail is where the author’s research and craft show plainly. This is 1940s Mexico rendered with real authority, from wartime blackout drills and swastika-flagged socialites to lonely hearts magazines, coffee-baron history, and the rigid courtship rituals of the port. It reads as lived-in, never like a costume.
The Prose and the Slow Burn
Moreno-Garcia writes with a controlled sensuality, plain when she wants a scalpel and lush when she wants atmosphere. She favors irony over melodrama. The book keeps you close through shifting points of view, letting you sit inside each schemer’s rationalizations, and much of the tension comes from watching three unreliable people misjudge one another in a house where privacy does not exist.
This is a novel of nerves rather than gunfire. Fans expecting the propulsive pace of a modern thriller should know that The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia takes its time, and that patience is the price of admission.
What Works, and Where It Wobbles
No book lands every note, and an honest review should say so. Here is the balance sheet.
What lands beautifully:
- Atmosphere and place. The setting is immersive and specific, one of the finest things about the book.
- Perla’s backstory. The flashback chapters give the novel its emotional weight and moral complexity.
- The moral murk. Three untrustworthy leads make for genuine suspense, since you cannot predict who will betray whom.
- Voice. Inés’s dry wit and the barbed dialogue keep the pages turning.
Where it stumbles for some readers:
- The pacing sags in the middle. Once the scheme is set, a stretch of the book circles the same beats before the tension spikes again.
- The romance runs cool. The attraction between two of the leads is written with deliberate iciness, which suits the theme but leaves the “sizzling” promised on the jacket feeling more like a low simmer.
- A late shift in gears asks a lot of the reader’s sympathy and may divide people, depending on how much villainy they will follow.
None of this sinks the book. It simply keeps a very good novel from being a flawless one.
Where It Sits in the Author’s Shelf
To be accurate, The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a standalone, not part of a series, so there is no reading order to worry about. It belongs to the noir and historical strand of her career rather than her fantasy or horror one. Readers who loved Velvet Was the Night and Untamed Shore will feel most at home, and those who came for the dread of Mexican Gothic will recognize the same gift for poisonous houses. Her wider shelf, including Gods of Jade and Shadow, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silver Nitrate, The Seventh Veil of Salome, and The Bewitching, shows a writer who refuses to repeat herself.
Similar Books You Might Enjoy
- Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, for more of her period Mexican noir
- The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, the gold standard of the charming-grifter thriller
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, for the oppressive house and the watchful woman inside it
- The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters, for slow-burn crime and simmering domestic tension
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, if the rotting-mansion mood is what pulls you
The Verdict
The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a smart, atmospheric slice of domestic noir that rewards readers who savor character over speed. It asks an uncomfortable question, which is whether a person raised inside a cage can climb out without becoming something monstrous, and it refuses to give a tidy answer. Come for the con. Stay for the rot beneath the good manners.