Death of a Tango King

Yolanda's a convict, caught by the cops while her boyfriend was robbing a bank. Now all the Hell Sisters at Harrington Hills prison farm are in love with her. Their leader wants to marry her. Yolanda has to find a way out. She's been taking a philosophy course in jail from Melvin P. Sparks, a Cornell professor who talks to the female convicts once a week about ecology, in galoshes and a torn shirt. But it's only a disguise. He's actually a member of the Christian Commandos, a ragtag group of environmental rangers who aren't quite soldiers or spies.
Yolanda happens to be the cousin of Ruben Falcone, king of the Medellín cartel. The rangers want to meet with Ruben, who's hiding in the jungles of Colombia, while a dozen agencies destroy the rain forest tracking him. Sparks helps Yolanda get out of jail, whisking her off to Mandellín to find her long lost cousin.
And so begins a journey that takes Yolanda into a crazy, comic heart of darkness, where nothing is ever as it seems, where a druglord can be a minister of environment, where Yolanda dances in a hundred rumbeaderos with different tango kings--all of them marked for death--and where she's sucked into the current of a world she only half understands. Death of a Tango King is a sad, funny, and disturbing novel about the coming of a new century, where the distance between right and wrong is not only irregular, but also hard to find.

Author: Jerome Charyn
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 03/01/1998
Pages: 246
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 8.49h x 5.77w x 0.86d
ISBN: 9780814715758

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 04/01/1998 pg. 446
Library Journal 04/01/1998 pg. 121
Publishers Weekly 04/27/1998 pg. 45
Booklist 04/15/1998 pg. 1379
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/1999 pg. 59 - Strongly Recommended

About the Author
Charyn, Jerome: - A Guggenheim Fellow, Jerome Charyn has taught at Stanford, Rice, and Princeton, and is currently teaching film history at the American University of Paris. Death of a Tango King is his twenty-eighth novel.