Untamed Shore is a noir novel featuring a questionable death and a shockingly cunning protagonist. I thought this was going to be another rote story about a good girl getting caught up with bad people, but I quite enjoyed the change in the protagonist’s character late in the story.

Untamed Shore is set in 1979 in the small coastal town of Desengaño in Baja California that does not see a lot of tourists, where the fishermen mainly trade in shark meat and the stench of shark carcasses pollutes the beach. Desengaño is stifling in both its heat and opportunity. Not much is expected of the women of Desengaño, including the novel’s protagonist, eighteen-year-old Viridiana, besides getting married and having children.

But Viridiana is not like the other women of Desengaño, certainly not like her mother, who left Desengaño for Mexico City when she was Viridiana’s age, but soon came back, pregnant and married to a man she would eventually divorce. Viridiana is a bibliophile who also loved watching old movies with her grandmother when she was still alive, and like all bibliophiles, Viridiana dreams of experiencing life outside of her small hometown, even if she only makes it as far as Mexico City, so long as she never comes back like her mother did.

Opportunity appears to manifest herself when Viridiana is hired to be the assistant to a rich American who has come to Desengaño, with his glamourous wife and her brother in tow, to write a book. The brother, Gregory, pays a lot of attention to Viridiana and makes a promise to run away to Paris with her. Viridiana isn’t an idiot (after all, she is bibliophile and us bibliophiles have more common sense than most people), but she is so desperate to get out of Desengaño that she is willing to believe that Gregory might actually be her ticket out of her boring life.

Then one of the Americans suddenly dies, and Viridiana finds herself caught up in the survivors’ unglamorous scheme that could get her into a lot of trouble – or killed. I was wondering how Viridiana was going to extricate herself from the mess she got herself involved in when before my eyes she transforms into a shark that turns the tables on the people who are using her. The story gets very dark towards the end, but I was entertained. Untamed Shore ranks high on my list of favourite Silvia Moreno-Garcia novels.