'Queen of the South' makes regal reading

The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.

With the first words of The Queen of the South, Arturo Prez-Reverte hits the ground running in this story of a compelling young Mexican woman. She is the terrified girlfriend of a dead drug runner, who eludes her pursuers and her past to evolve into a legendary narca, the architect of a multi-nation drug transport network.

As in earlier novels by this popular Spanish author, the past is much more than prologue. In The Club Dumas (1998), the original 19th-century manuscript of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers is at the heart of a mystery, as is a 15th-century painting in The Flanders Panel (1996).

In this, Prez-Reverte's sixth novel, the past is linked to the present and future through a young woman living in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. It is a land controlled by drug cartels, where songs called narcocorridos immortalize the men who live fast and die young.

It is here that Teresa Mendoza survives poverty and abuse to become Gero Dvila's woman. The dashing pilot of cocaine-laden planes gives Teresa a cell phone that will ring only with news of his death, which means her own death will follow if she doesn't run.

The phone rings, sending her on a journey that takes her to Spain and through a series of incarnations. She becomes the girlfriend of another handsome drug runner who teaches her about boats, navigation and survival on the Straits of Gibraltar. She becomes an inmate in a Spanish prison, where her wealthy cellmate introduces her to the world of books.

And she rises like a phoenix from the ashes of this life to become the creator and chief executive of a criminal empire.

Fans of Prez-Reverte, whose work has been called both cerebral and swashbuckling, have been looking forward to this new book, and he rewards them handsomely for their patience. He is an amazing storyteller. This is a brutal story, told beautifully.

The novel's construction is clever, alternating between Teresa's perspective, beginning when she is 23, and that of a journalist writing a book about the woman long known as the Queen of the South. (Prez-Riverte was a journalist a war correspondent for years before turning to fiction.)

The reporter begins in the present, interviewing Teresa in a safe house on what might be the last day of her life. The mystery of her fate frames the parallel narratives, the chapters on Teresa's life taking turns with the journalist's interviews years later with the people who played supporting roles in those times. They are mainly politicians and police officers of questionable virtue, to put it mildly.

One of the author's master strokes is Teresa's intellectual coming of age within the confines of El Puerto de Santa Maria, where her cellmate is Patricia O'Farrell, the black sheep of high society.

Prez-Reverte returns to Dumas when O'Farrell gives Teresa a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. The story of Edmond Dants, framed and imprisoned, and the Abb Faria, who educates him and leads him to great wealth, foreshadows the relationship between the women.

Despite the fact that Teresa leaves a trail of bodies in her wake, Prez-Reverte gives her a vulnerability and an everywoman quality. She begins with nothing, is underestimated and mistreated. But she pulls herself up by sheer strength of courage and intellect.

What Teresa says about a favorite story could well be said of this fine novel:

"The way the words flowed fascinated her, as though she had peered into an unknown, shadowy, magical place that was related to something she herself possessed she was sure of that in some dark part of her blood and memory."