by Azam Ahmed
“Azam Ahmed has written a page-turning mystery but also a stunning, color-saturated portrait of the collapse of formal justice in one Mexican town.”—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Directorate S
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library
Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice.
Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice.
What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own.
“Azam Ahmed has written a page-turning mystery but also a stunning, color-saturated portrait of the collapse of formal justice in one Mexican town.”—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Directorate S
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library
Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice.
Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice.
What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own.
Reviews-
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April 1, 2023
A global investigative correspondent for the New York Times and its former bureau chief in Mexico, Ahmed here tells two stories. He chronicles the efforts of Miriam Rodr�guez to bring to justice the men responsible for the murder of her 20-year-old daughter, Karen, while also clarifying the violence haunting Mexico today by revealing how the Zeta drug cartel came to dominate Miriam's quiet hometown on the U.S.-Mexico border. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from July 17, 2023
New York Times reporter Ahmed debuts with a riveting chronicle of Mexico’s cartels told through the story of one family who became their target. In 2010, the vicious Zeta cartel took control of the small Mexican town of San Fernando after a bloody fight with the Gulf cartel. Kidnappings and murders escalated for years under Zeta rule, until the “disappeared” numbered in the hundreds. Divorced, middle-aged mother Miriam Rodriguez had her quiet life in San Fernando turned upside down when the Zetas took her daughter, Karen, in 2012. Rodriguez paid the $77,000 ransom for Karen’s safe return, but she never turned up. Devastated, Rodriguez came to accept that Karen had been killed and resolved to track down the people responsible. Battling both cartels and corrupt local officials, she used Facebook and anonymous tips to find and detain a long list of targets connected to Karen’s disappearance, taking down 10 in all. On Mother’s Day, 2017, Rodriguez was gunned down outside her home shortly after turning in the latest of Karen’s captors. Though Ahmed offers glimmers of hope throughout, his ultimate outlook is bleak: “Some life had returned to San Fernando from the worst days,” he writes about Miriam’s successes in weakening Zeta leadership and reducing violence in the region. “But the empty relics of better times still paid tribute to before.” Painstakingly reported and propulsively written, this is nearly impossible to put down. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. -
August 1, 2023
A harrowing expos�, years in the making, of the tyranny of the drug cartels in Mexico. In 2014, writes former New York Times Mexico bureau chief Ahmed, a young woman named Karen Rodr�guez disappeared from the streets of a small town in Tamaulipas. The town had once been in the thrall of the Gulf cartel, then fell into the hands of the Zetas, the most violent drug gang in Mexico, whose leaders recruited locals, mostly young, as their couriers and assassins. In one horrific incident that Ahmed recounts, they murdered 72 migrants in one night, burying them in a mass grave on a nearby ranch. Karen wound up buried there, too, with local authorities looking the other way despite the furious intervention of her mother, Miriam, who, one by one, tracked down the killers and attempted to bring them to justice. In some instances, something like justice unfolded. For example, when Mexican marines detained two assassins who had kidnapped and killed local women, they shot one at point-blank range and shot the other in the back after they told her to run. In this powerful narrative, Ahmed shows how the marines are about the only element of the Mexican government that has been remotely effective; police and elected officials are often in the pockets of the cartels, and the bureaucracy is formidable. As Miriam discovered when seeking justice for Karen, "There was an art to the throat-clearing formalism of the government's legal communications, a vernacular that relied on language so circular and difficult to understand that one got the feeling its entire purpose was to obfuscate." In fact, it was, and the government's inaction forced Miriam into vigilantism. Thanks to her mother's persistence, Karen's fate is known, but the cartels continue to work largely unimpeded, having amassed a count of victims in Tamaulipas of "more than ten thousand." A dispiriting yet necessary study of how a criminal enterprise can swallow a nation whole.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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August 1, 2023
In 2014, Karen Rodriguez was kidnapped by the Zeta drug cartel and, despite her family paying the demanded ransom, was never seen again. In his action-packed debut, journalist Ahmed chronicles Miriam Rodriguez's relentless quest for vengeance against the Zetas who disappeared her daughter. "Retribution . . . became an all-consuming force" as she investigated the people involved and painstakingly built up evidence to prove their guilt. Miriam's family lived in San Fernando, the "epicenter" of the war between the Gulf and Zeta cartels. The Zetas in particular were known for their violence, using murder to wage "psychological warfare" against ordinary citizens. Ahmed builds a detailed picture of their reign of terror through a history of the cartels, Mexican politics, and stories of residents like the Rodriguez family, who lived in "perpetual torture," never knowing what truly happened to their disappeared family members. This vivid, disturbing story will appeal to readers interested in drug cartels and true crime.COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
