DRUG RUNNER'S GIRLFRIEND BECOMES LEGENDARY `QUEEN OF THE SOUTH'

They Call Them Narcocorridos, Ballads About Mexican Drug Runners. Just
Songs, Right?

So thinks the narrator of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's intriguing new novel
about a drug runner's girlfriend who transforms herself into the
legendary Queen of the South, a ``woman who appeared on the society
pages the same week she turned up in the newspapers' police blotter.''

Her name is Teresa Mendoza, and in the beginning, she is just a
dark-haired girl with big, black eyes. Her lover, Güero Dávila, flies
blocks of cocaine and bales of marijuana in his Cessna, eluding both
the Federales and the DEA. Then one afternoon, as she listens to San
Jose's Los Tigres del Norte singing a narcocorrido on the stereo, the
phone rings. She knows what it means. Güero is dead. Run.

Fast-forward a dozen years. The narrator, a magazine writer working on
a story about the Queen of the South, is at last face-to-face with his
subject. He wants to know about Sinaloa, Mexico, back when it all
started, when the blond, smiling Güero first put his
aviator-jacket-clad arm around the vulnerable girl from the barrio. He
then tells readers not only about Teresa's escape to Spain, where she
worked as a cashier in a bar and fell for another drug runner, but
also about how she managed to go from prisoner to player, heading a
Mediterranean drug-trafficking ring. How she became a woman to be
reckoned with in a man's world.

Pérez-Reverte neatly splices the reporter's recounting of events with
flashbacks in which Teresa commands center stage. Suspenseful action
sequences, in which Teresa plans drug deals or confronts enemies,
balance more-reflective passages as she tries not to remember too much.

``She had discovered too many uncertainties and horrors lurking in
every thought that went beyond the here and now. But as long as she
didn't actually think, the remembering would give her no more than a
sensation of movement toward nowhere, like a boat adrift.''

``The Queen of the South'' is something of a departure for
Pérez-Reverte, a former journalist whose book sales in his native
Spain are comparable to those of Stephen King in this country and
whose award-winning novels are a staple of European bestseller lists.
His previous five books published in the United States have been
clever, stylish entertainments, sophisticated thrillers for people who
think. They merge history with mystery. ``The Flanders Panel,'' for
example, centers on a puzzle presented by a 15th-century painting of
two chess players, while ``The Club Dumas'' follows the adventures of
an antiquarian book sleuth on the trail of a rare manuscript.

These books are much more intricate than the straightforward ``The
Queen of the South.'' This story, however, has already inspired a
song. Los Tigres del Norte recorded a narcocorrido, ``La Reina del
Sur,'' when the novel was first published in Spain two years ago.

At the end of ``The Queen of the South'' -- the last 40 pages are
riveting as Teresa comes full circle to contend with an old betrayal
- -- the narrator imagines himself sitting in a Mexican bar listening to
songs on a jukebox. ``I was sorry I lacked the talent to sum it all up
in three minutes of words and music. Mine, for good or ill, was going
to be a corrido on paper.''

The narcocorridos, he has discovered, are more than songs. Just ask
Teresa Mendoza, the Queen of the South.

THE QUEEN OF THE SOUTH

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

Putnam, 437 pp., $25.95