Velvet Was the Night

Digital audiobook performed by Gisela Chipe


Adapted from the book jacket: 1970s, Mexico City, Maite is a secretary who live: the latest issue of Secret Romance. When her next-door neighbor, Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman – and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents. Meanwhile, someone else is also looking for Leonora. Elvis is an eccentric criminal who longs to escape his own life. As Maite and Elvis come closer to discovering the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, they can no longer escape the danger that threatens to consume their lives.

My reactions:
This is the third book by Moreno-Garcia that I’ve read and by far my favorite. In this work she does NOT include paranormal, horror, or magical realism elements. Rather she writes a wonderful noir crime novel based on historical events in Mexico, with interesting characters, multiple twists and turns in the plot and an unlikely partnership that I’d love to see again.

Maite starts as a somewhat naïve, dreamy young woman, more interested in romance stories that what is actually happening around her. But once she’s caught up in the mystery of her missing neighbor, Maite shows her intelligence, grit and determination.

Elvis is a marvel. A street punk and henchman, who love literature and music. He’s not sure he is where he wants to be in life and the events that unfold help him find a better life path.

The action is fast and furious, and totally believable. Well done, Ms Moreno-Garcia!

Gisela Chipe does a marvelous job of performing the audiobook. I particularly loved how she interpreted Maite.

Mexico City in the 1970s is such a gritty and crazy backdrop for this awesome pulp noir story. Amazing characters, political upheaval, an evil paramilitary boss, and when a mysterious beautiful neighbor vanishes, loner Maite suddenly is a part of much more than her comic book romances provide. Filled with just the right amount of tension and suspense this was a wonderful read. It reminded me a lot of the movie True Romance.

So atmospheric and moody. I felt like we were waiting for the main plot to drop for most of the book, and finally realized I needed to take the plot at face value. The setting provides some good history, and the characters feel like they're reflective of their time

2022 pandemic read. I love a book that teaches me, and expands my world view as well as entertains my brain.

A noir novel that simmers over a slow fire; it's slow but substantial. It presents characters that seem pathetic at first glance, but who have aspects that anyone can empathize with. The mystery seems uninteresting at the beginning, and as the reading progresses, one realizes that it has layers and layers, culminating in an explosion at the end, with a conclusion that leaves you on edge, and a new story waiting for the protagonist to take a step forward to begin. Or she could continue on her regular path. In short, it's slow, but I liked it. (Translated from Spanish)

What does this book have to say? It’s just plot, just pablum to keep you chewing. There’s nothing new here and nothing complex, emotionally or intellectually. And what’s worse is the novel’s self-conscious needle-dropping (there’s even an authorial playlist!) and wannabe noirishness. For all the carefully curated songs, there’s no sense of time or place (CDMX, ‘71). Just an overweening lowbrow pretentiousness and sloppy writing like:

The tension and excitement of the past few days was the kindle they required.

The kindling, surely? A standard awful sex scene follows, and everything is described so mundanely it hurts.

We’re reminded time and time again that the heroine (she’s hardly anti) is independent, likes pop music, and is just right for the (hardly anti) hero. Every twist of the plot is as foreseeable as the twist of my neck when a bottle is uncorked. Every character is young and made of papier-mâché except El Mago, the most interesting one and the one written off as a plain ole asshole.

I’m not super into noir but what little I’ve read and seen has an overpowering sense of atmosphere and moral quandary. This book doesn’t.

Very enjoyable...historical fiction with a noir feel that keeps you guessing. Characters well-developed throughout and different plot lines come together nicely. Not many dull parts...each development in the story kept me highly interested in where it was going. 4 stars

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC.

Maite works as a legal secretary in Mexico in the 1970s. She is perpetually lonely, bored, in debt, and generally unsatisfied with her life. Her neighbor asks her to look after her cat while she is gone for a few days, and when the neighbor doesn't come back, Maite tries to find her and ends up getting involved with corrupt police, gangs, and government conspiracies.

As much as this should have been an exciting thriller, I mostly found it to be tedious, mostly because the main characters, Maite and Elvis, a gang member, are really tedious and one-dimensional. Every paragraph that mentions Maite also mentions that she is in debt, or mad at her mother, or bored. If the book weren't constantly harping on Maite's unhappiness, it could have been a lot shorter and less of a slow burn. Mostly I was just distracted my how annoying Maite was.

Historical fiction set in 1971 Mexico.
When a neighbor asks her to watch her cat, Maite, a comic book lover, agrees, but plans to take a few items from the apartment as part of her payment. Then her neighbor, Leonora, disappears, and people come looking for her and some photos Leonora hid. Maite can’t find them and her involvement with her neighbor brings her danger. She meets Elvis who is a thug, and he is also searching for Leonora.
I really wasn’t interested in the story, it was just ok. However, if you are interested in the corruption of Mexico in the 1970s, you might enjoy this.

How could I have missed the days of the "Dirty War" in the 70s? After reading this story filled with violence, sex and revenge from the dark side, it feels like I'm a little more up to speed.

A Mexican group, known as the Hawks, attacked, tortured and killed student protestors on the left side of politics. One of the main characters was Leonora, an art student and activist, who asked her neighbor, Maite, to take care of her cat for a couple of days. Little did Maite know that she was now feeling like she was inside one of her favorite books: Secret Romance which gave her a taste of danger. The big question was: what happened to Leonora as she disappeared after a few days while strange men made their way into her apartment looking for photos.

The book was much different than the author's previous one: Mexican Gothic. I found it to be engaging with the historical part opening up my eyes. There were a lot of references to Maite's passion for books, comics and music. It shows when life is crazy on the outside, it's what keeps us going. One of her friends pointed out, "Change should come peacefully. We need a more educated nation, we need to come to agreements." The book leaves the reader with much to think about.

A slow burn but intricately entangled noir tale, where you're never quite sure who the bad guys are, and who are the good guys, or is there any such distinction? Darkness and brutality are balanced with hope and possibility, and enough twists and entanglements to keep you reading to find out what will happen.

To say that Moreno-Garcia’s writing is always fresh, original and entertaining is a fact. She brings her talent to a thriller about Mexico’s Dirty War in the 1970’s. Through the eyes of two different people, Maite, a single woman working as a secretary wishing for more to her life and Elvis the hired killer for a group of enforcers who are determined to squash communism. I didn’t realize that this book was going to turn into a noir story, but it did with a vengeance. Maite, finds herself the target of the government when she agrees to take care of a neighbor’s cat for a few days. The few days turn into many and Maite starts looking for her neighbor, who is an outspoken critic of the government with many anti-government friends. Because of this, Elvis and two other thugs are assigned to watch her. The tension and the violence Maite finds leads to an ending which no reader will anticipate.

Moreno’s new novel, Velvet was the Night, just drips noir. The title itself suggests the seedy, murky, and humid backdrop which is populated with a variety of characters possessing a sliding scale of scruples. The novel centers on the 1970s political tensions in Mexico and revolves around Maite, a plain woman of 30 who lives for her pulpy romantic books and high end vinyl albums, and Elvis, a young enforcer in an anti-political freedom group, the Hawks. They both embark separately on finding a young woman who may or may not possess incriminating film of government higher ups. The story itself was just okay and a tad on the slow side, but all the characters were fabulous and really fit the mood of the novel. I also liked that the author included a playlist at the end of the book and a blurb about the importance of music during this period in Mexico.

It’s 1971 in Mexico City and the clandestine government sanctioned and CIA trained Hawks are infiltrating student groups and violently cracking down on protests. In this tense atmosphere two people are about to find their paths converging on a mystery. Maite, a legal secretary in her late 20s, agrees to pet sit for her neighbor to earn some extra cash. Only her neighbor never returns. What begins as a quest to get paid (and find someone to take the cat) turns into a full on investigation that involves her with communist art groups, rich antiques salesmen, secret police, and more trouble than she could ever have predicted. Meanwhile, Elvis, a member of the Hawks, is tasked with tracking down a missing woman and the film she disappeared with. Through Maite and Elvis’ overlapping investigations Moreno-Garcia

With her great talent for character and storytelling, Moreno-Garcia’s Velvet was the Night is a lush historical noir that brings 1970s Mexico City to vivid life. Featuring a slow-burn plot full of suspense, readers will be enthralled until the last page.

Disclosure: An egalley of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this book from NetGalley to review.

Thoughts: This book follows two characters. The first is Maite who is a secretary with a somewhat lonely miserable life who absolutely lives for her romantic comics. The second is Elvis, he is an enforcer for a local government supported gang. The two end up interacting over the disappearance of one of Maite’s neighbors, Leonora.

I stopped reading this about 40% of the way through. The story just did not hold my interest at all. Both the character POVs we are reading from are fairly boring and hard to engage in. The story takes place in Mexico City in the 1970's during the Dirty War, which I thought would be intriguing. However, at 40% I still wasn’t sure what the point was. Up to the 40% mark it was a very “day in the life of” type of story with very little plot.

The cover is beautiful but that's all this really has going for it (at least as far as I read in). I have a lot of review books lined up to read and just don't have the patience for something that moves so slow and seems so wandering and pointless.

I enjoyed "Mexican Gothic" and also have "Gods of Jade and Shadow" on my shelf to read. This book is quite a bit different in subject, genre, and pacing and I didn't find it was different in a good way.

My Summary (2/5): Overall this was a book I didn’t even remotely enjoy. The characters are unlikable and hard to engage with, the plot is barely there, and the pacing is very slow. All of this made for a book I struggled to read, it was just so boring that I kept falling asleep while reading it. I still plan on reading “The Gods of Jade and Shadow” and hope that that book is more intriguing than this one was.

A really cool, anxiety-inducing historical suspense set around real events in 1970s Mexico. At the beginning of the novel, neither of our shifting-point-of-view characters has much to recommend them—Elvis is a government goon-for-hire with shallow aspirations, and Maite is a depressed secretary with low self esteem and kleptomania. Neither seems to have a lot of empathy or concern for other people, but they are also so intriguingly relatable, with their quirks, passions, and identical longing for the real attachments and support both their lives are lacking. Elvis and Maite don't know each other, but both are drawn into a dangerous conflict between the corrupt government and the idealistic counterculture, formed around a missing woman in possession of some damning photographs. The story keeps you on the edge of your seat, hoping our two protagonists can make it through the ambushes and shootouts unscathed—and maybe to one another.