MILENA, OR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FEMUR IN THE WORLD

The spirit of Stieg Larsson visits Mexico City.

Milena’s story is an exemplar of the global sex trade: born Alka Moritz in Croatia and abducted at 16, she is prostituted across southern Europe and ends up in the clutches of the Ukrainian-Russian Mafia in Marbella, Spain. She’s elevated out of common prostitution by a Spanish lawyer who launders money for gangsters, in particular funds intended by Russia to support Eastern Ukraine separatists, in contravention of United Nations sanctions. She gathers information for him and, eventually, under his tutelage becomes an assassin. When her third assassination goes badly, she and her handlers are bundled off to Mexico, where Rosendo Franco, the publisher of El Mundo, a powerful newspaper, takes her as a mistress. The story opens with Rosendo’s death in Milena’s bed; the back story is provided in flashbacks that detail the abuses of sex trafficking. Milena, who has kept records of some of the banking transactions, rightly fears for her life with her protector dead. She tries to disappear, but an implausible assembly of characters in Mexico finds her and attempts to reconcile the forces threatening her. This requires more plot twists, more deaths, trans-Atlantic negotiations, and even a few visits to the darknet. Overall, it is not baroque plotting that most mars this novel: it feels unedited. There are numerous simple errors—elisions, repetitions, inaccurate word choices: “He was aware of...the adversity of Herminio Guerra, the Deputy Director, a man who felt himself more qualified to lead the paper.” “Adversity” here should be “animosity.” Some of these can be attributed to the translation process, but even a cursory editorial examination would have caught most of them. There is a lack of proportion in the space given to minor or insignificant events, and the novel is dense with similes, many of them contradictory or confusing. An Author’s Note makes it clear that the story is intended to be an exposé of human trafficking and the global sex trade—sources are cited, authorial decisions are explicated—and the details are damning. But a lot of important work has been left undone.

Well-intentioned but not a very thrilling thriller.