El ultimo secreto de Frida K.

Author: Gregorio León
- Fiction
- Algaida Editores
- ISBN: 9788498774580
- Release Date: 06-30-2010
-Reviewed by: Eduardo de Lamadrid

El último secreto de Frida K. by Gregorio León, winner of the Tenth Emilio Alarcos Llorach International Prize for the Novel, is based on the supposed sentimental and sexual connection between the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. According to León, the origin of the novel is the confirmation made by Trotsky's own bodyguard that such a relationship did in fact exist. Taking that confirmation as a point of departure, the author tells the story of what could have been the affective relationship between the two figures, a relationship that they hid from their respective partners, and which led the Surrealist painter and the creator of the Red Army to become passionate lovers. 

A painting by Frida Kahlo, the wife of Diego Rivera, is stolen in Mexico City. The Spanish detective Daniela Ackerman is called to take on the case. She travels from Spain to Mexico City, charged with recovering the painting, within which a secret is hidden. Frida Kahlo included in the painting a message that would testify to her amorous relationship with Trotsky, then pursued by Stalin until his assassination by the Catalan Ramón Mercader with an ice pick.

During her stay in Mexico City, Daniela Ackerman will cross paths with a down-at-the-heels journalist who writes a story detailing the sentimental ties between Kahlo and Trotsky; with the murder of several exotic dancers whose mutilated bodies are discovered at a refinery with the image of the Santa Muerte (Holy Death) tattooed on their left breasts; with a religious sect in opposition to the Vatican, whose raisón d'etre is the worship of that very Santa Muerte (a skeleton dressed as a bride), an important and deeply-rooted element in Mexican culture, and whose altars are subject to the assaults of a mysterious perpetrator, who only leaves behind a note which reads "In the name of God" after each attack; with the narcos and capos involved in the murders and the theft; and with a Mexican policeman, a loser who recovers some enthusiasm for life because of his attraction to the detective.

Two narrative strands are mixed in the novel: one set in 1940s Mexico and whose protagonists are Kahlo and Trotsky, and another set in present day Mexico City, where the exposition of the detective's investigative efforts leads to a satisfactory denouement. 

The novel is written in an ingenious manner, and despite its at times gruesome subject matter, is not lacking in humor. The prose is succinct and precise, which produces the fast pace so appropriate to the thriller genre. Indeed, the novel can easily be read in one sitting.

El último secreto de Frida K. adroitly combines the historical love story with the detective story, magisterially uniting the present and the past. And it does so coherently that it makes the reader's hairs stand on end in admiration. Pure evil does exist, and is very much alive and well.

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