Death of a Tango King

By Jerome Charyn

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 Medell n 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 Mandell n 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814715753
• ISBN13: 9780814715758
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"