Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha

Book excerpt: Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha is a new novel by Matthew Stadler, the author of Allan Stein and Landscape: Memory. In a provincial Mexican capital a well-known expat gringa is found dead on a remote hillside. Narco gangs are suspected, but the real killer might be closer to home.The novel is a "cover" of another book, John Le Carre's A Murder of Quality (in the pop music tradition of cover songs, which are new renditions of old standards). The author explains his precise method in a special afterword to this unusual book.