News of a Kidnapping – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is Marquez’s equivalent of Capote’s In Cold Blood – a sumptuous novelist reins in the adjectives to look at a real and important criminal case. Here the issue is the kidnapping of politically valuable hostages by the Escobar narcotics cartel in 1990s Colombia. I was more involved in the day-to-day situations in which the victims, mainly middle-aged women, found themselves than the big picture political narrative with which it intercuts.