Fowler may succeed not only because she's squarely in the mode of comic social novelist, but also because "The Jane Austen Book Club" is the work of someone who understands the mixture of surprise and recognition that novel readers crave. We want stories to surprise us and to confirm our experience, or nudge us to confirm what we may never have experienced but which is true. That's what her Austen acolytes are looking for, and for all the fun she has with them, Fowler understands it's not a sign of shallowness or of being literary lowbrows. She's taken exactly the kind of characters it would have been easy to condescend to (or to flatter) and made what they want from novels -- a simultaneous sense of comfort and adventure -- seem something like a code all fiction readers share. How many novels have used the old phrase "gentle reader" to satirical effect? Reading "The Jane Austen Book Club," you feel as if Fowler could use it and mean every syllable.

-- Charles Taylor

art

"The Queen of the South"
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translated by Andrew Hurley
 438 pages
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Order from Powells.com

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's new novel is a literary narcocorrido, the name given to popular Mexican songs celebrating the exploits of drug traffickers. What lends his subject to a 400-page book rather than a broadsheet ballad set to a polka beat is his protagonist, Teresa Mendoza, who at the peak of her power controls 70 percent of the drug-transport business in the southern Mediterranean. Teresa is no simple macho outlaw, braced to go out in a blaze of glory with an AK-47 in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other -- although she knows her way around both. Her story is necessarily a more complicated and contradictory one than can be squeezed into a song.

Pérez-Reverte, a journalist turned bestselling writer, takes leave of his usual fictional forte here. Instead of a Byzantine plot built around some evocative bit of historical arcana -- rare books, nautical charts, fencing -- "The Queen of the South" is a straightforward contemporary crime thriller with a reflective, moody soul. It begins with a ringing cellphone, the sound that marks the dividing line in Teresa's life, between the relatively simple (though never innocent) girl she once was -- a former money-changer from the Mexican state of Sinaloa who catches the eye and heart of Güero Dávila, a brash, handsome pilot running shipments for the local drug lords -- and the woman she becomes -- tough, smart and perpetually on the run. Güero has told her that if that phone ever rings, she should understand that he's been killed, and that she is next.

Teresa flees to Spain, where she finds a different man who pursues a similar line of work around Gibraltar, where North Africa and Europe almost meet, separated by a narrow strip of water on which a guy with a very fast boat can make a very nice chunk of change. Teresa will learn the hard way, through a process that includes a stint in a Spanish prison, that she's better off not depending on such men. She's clever, with a good head for numbers, a knack for mechanics, and a hollow place deep inside her where most other people keep whatever it is they have to lose. These are the makings of a kingpin -- make that a queenpin. Eventually she becomes fabulously wealthy and elegant, and is named one of the best-dressed women in Spain.

"The Queen of the South" proceeds according to an unusual rhythm; passages of gasping suspense alternate with brooding psychological rumination and meticulously detailed descriptions of how Teresa's empire is built and run. Pérez-Reverte returns to his reportorial roots on the last count; he knows so much about drug running it's gotta be illegal. (Several of the characters Pérez-Reverte portrays are real people, including the Mexican drug lord César "Batman" Güemes.) Then there's a framing device that probably works better in the original version, in which a journalist putting together a book on Teresa's life describes his interviews with her past associates. The contrast between his Castilian account and Teresa's own story -- written in a slangy Mexican idiom -- has to be more evocative in Spanish.

If "The Queen of the South" were about a man, perhaps it would seem less distinctive; Teresa has many of the dissociative, isolated qualities of the stereotypical noir hero. But because she's a woman, Pérez-Reverte can use her yearning for wholeness to scrutinize everything that's stunted about this particular macho ideal. Yes, "The Queen of the South" is a kind of narcocorrido, but it's also an anti-narcocorrido, an outsider's inside account of a world in which people are all too willing to sacrifice their humanity for the kind of immortality embodied in a four-minute song.

-- Laura Miller

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