The Intrigue (2026)
Book Details
The Intrigue (2026)
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⚠️ Trigger Warnings
- Murder
- Graphic physical violence
- Death from falling / being pushed down stairs
- Blunt-force trauma
- Gun violence
- Physical assault
- Domestic abuse
- Poisoning
- Involuntary drugging
- Spiked food and drinks
- Suicide
- Drug overdose
- Staged suicide
- Substance dependence / drug misuse
- Alcoholism / heavy drinking
- Childhood trauma
- Child witnessing a parent’s murder
- Emotional abuse
- Verbal abuse
- Financial abuse
- Forced unpaid servitude
- Blackmail and extortion
- Sexual coercion / sexual extortion
- Fraud and romance scams
- Grief and traumatic loss
- Classism
- Sexism
- Racial prejudice
- Stigmatization of illegitimacy / out-of-wedlock birth
⏱️ 2-Minute Spoiler Summary
In 1943, Ulises Linares is a handsome twenty-nine-year-old con man in Mexico City who makes his living answering lonely-hearts ads, romancing women under false names, and stealing their money. After being chased out of Jalisco for swindling a wealthy widow, he needs a new target. He chooses Perla Inclán, a forty-three-year-old unmarried woman living in the remote Veracruz mountain town of Puerco Ahogado, mostly because the train fare there is cheaper than his other option.
Perla runs a fading guesthouse and clings fiercely to the prestige of her once-wealthy family. Living with her is her twenty-two-year-old niece, Inés Inclán, who is treated more like an unpaid servant than family. Inés quickly searches Ulises’s belongings, discovers letters addressed to several of his aliases, and realizes exactly what he is doing. Instead of exposing him, she proposes a partnership: she will help him swindle Perla if they split the money fifty-fifty. Inés wants enough money to finally escape her aunt and the town of Puerco Ahogado.
Their scheme becomes increasingly dangerous. Inés helps remove Perla’s persistent suitor, lawyer Cándido Sotomayor, from the picture temporarily, giving Ulises time to sweep Perla into a whirlwind romance and marry her. Afterward, Ulises and Inés break into the desk of Perla’s dead father and discover that Perla has 87,000 pesos in the bank—and that the guesthouse will pass to Inés when Perla dies. Inés also finds letters proving that her biological father repeatedly tried to contact her, but Perla deliberately kept them hidden. Furious, Inés suggests they simply kill Perla and divide everything.
Their first murder attempt goes horribly wrong. They poison Perla’s sherry with toxic seeds, but she leaves the bottle untouched. Professor Nepomuceno, an elderly lodger who has been a surrogate father to Inés, finds it and drinks it instead. He dies, and his death is mistakenly ruled a suicide.
Then Cándido returns and discovers Ulises’s true identity. He blackmails Inés, demanding 20,000 pesos, Ulises’s departure, and sexual favors in exchange for his silence. Inés arranges to meet him, drugs his drink, and hits him with a rock. She and Ulises take him to a cliff called the Devil’s Chair, but Cándido wakes and attacks Ulises. Together, Inés and Ulises beat him to death, put his body in his car, and push it over the cliff. Inés later persuades police officer Bartolo that Cándido probably killed himself over Perla’s marriage, helping prevent a serious investigation.
Ulises eventually decides the scheme has become too dangerous. He steals Perla’s cash and jewelry and plans to abandon Inés, but he changes his mind and returns for her. By then, Perla has discovered the conspiracy through a letter Cándido left behind. During their confrontation, Inés finally recovers a childhood memory she had suppressed: Perla murdered Inés’s mother, Encarnación, by pushing her down the stairs when Inés was ten.
When Inés tries to leave, Perla pulls a gun. Ulises arrives, Inés fights with her aunt, and Perla chases them through the house. Then Professor Nepomuceno’s dog, Diógenes, runs across the landing and trips Perla. She tumbles down the grand staircase, eerily repeating the fate she inflicted on Encarnación years earlier. Ulises grabs the injured Inés and Diógenes, and the three escape Puerco Ahogado together.
Three years later, Perla is still alive but permanently injured and living as a recluse after deliriously confessing to murders following her fall. Bartolo briefly spots Inés in Mexico City, now glamorous, wealthy, and seemingly transformed. Inside an upscale restaurant, she reunites with Ulises, revealing that they have become equal partners running sophisticated lonely-hearts scams. Their next destination is Havana.
📖 Full Spoiler Summary
A Con Man Comes to Puerco Ahogado
In 1943, Ulises Linares is twenty-nine, handsome enough to resemble a movie star, and nearly broke. He survives by placing personal ads in lonely-hearts magazines, corresponding with women under various aliases, and charming them out of their money. His latest scam ended badly when the sons of wealthy widow Cornelia Aguirre discovered what he was doing and chased him out of Jalisco.
Looking for his next target, Ulises has two promising responses to an ad in Conmovedor: a thirty-year-old widow in Monclova and forty-three-year-old Perla Inclán, an unmarried woman in Puerco Ahogado, a foggy mountain town in Veracruz. He chooses Perla for the thoroughly unromantic reason that getting to Veracruz costs less.
Perla runs a declining guesthouse that reflects the fortunes of the once-prominent Inclán family. Although the family’s wealth has largely disappeared, she remains intensely proud of her social standing and determined to maintain appearances. The household includes several eccentric lodgers, among them elderly Professor Nepomuceno, an impoverished alcoholic who has become a surrogate father to Perla’s niece, Inés Inclán.
Twenty-two-year-old Inés occupies a very different position in the family. She is the illegitimate daughter of Perla’s late younger sister, Encarnación, and has spent years essentially working as Perla’s unpaid servant. Intelligent, sarcastic, and desperate to leave Puerco Ahogado, she immediately recognizes that there is something suspicious about the handsome stranger who has arrived to court her aunt.
Her suspicions are confirmed when she searches Ulises’s room. Hidden inside his suitcase are personal ads and letters from women addressed to several different names, including Leonardo Lagos, Armando Zozaya, and Luis Cacho.
Instead of turning him in, Inés sees an opportunity.
Inés Joins the Con
Inés confronts Ulises and tells him she knows exactly what he is: a fraud who romances women for their money. But she also knows Perla better than he ever could. If Ulises agrees to split whatever he steals fifty-fifty, Inés will help him manipulate her aunt.
Ulises accepts.
Their biggest immediate obstacle is Cándido Sotomayor, the arrogant local lawyer who has been courting Perla for two years. Cándido has financial motives of his own, hoping marriage will combine their properties and wealth. To get him out of town, Inés secretly gives a massive dose of laxatives to his hypochondriac sister, Lulú. Her resulting illness sends Cándido and Lulú to Mexico City for several weeks.
With his rival conveniently absent, Ulises accelerates his courtship. Rather than playing the restrained gentleman, he becomes passionately romantic, overwhelming Perla with the attention she has long craved. It works. The two quickly marry in a civil ceremony in nearby Las Tunas.
As Ulises works on Perla, the history of the Inclán family gradually emerges. In 1919, Perla had been in love with wealthy coffee heir Norberto Bustillo, but Norberto chose her younger sister Encarnación instead. Encarnación later scandalized the family by running away with the married Rómulo Mateos, with whom she had Inés. Rómulo eventually abandoned them.
Years later, Encarnación returned home with her daughter. When she received a job offer in Mexico City and prepared to leave again, she and Perla had a vicious argument. Perla pushed Encarnación down the stairs, killing her. Ten-year-old Inés witnessed it, but the trauma left her mute for a year and eventually buried the memory beneath recurring nightmares.
The Scheme Turns Into a Murder Plot
After marrying Perla, Ulises and Inés break into the locked desk belonging to Perla’s late father, Don Osorio Inclán, hoping to find money. Ulises discovers 2,000 pesos in cash and something potentially much more valuable: Don Osorio’s will states that when Perla dies, the guesthouse belongs to Inés.
Inés makes an even more painful discovery. Hidden inside are letters from her biological father, who repeatedly tried to contact her before his death. Perla never gave them to her. She deliberately prevented Inés from knowing that her father wanted to see her, keeping her dependent and isolated.
Inés is furious. Perla has 87,000 pesos in the bank, and Inés will inherit the house upon her death. Rather than merely robbing her aunt, Inés tells Ulises they should kill her.
They decide on poison. Inés obtains toxic haba de San Ignacio seeds, and they lace the bottle of sherry Perla drinks while taking her evening bath. But an argument with Ulises sends Perla storming away before she drinks it.
Later, the hungry Professor Nepomuceno finds the abandoned sherry.
He drinks it and dies in his armchair.
The death devastates Inés because Nepomuceno was one of the few people who genuinely cared for her. Yet their crime remains undiscovered. A note in the professor’s jacket leads Dr. Carrel and Father Anselmo to conclude that he killed himself with pills, leaving Inés and Ulises responsible for an innocent man’s death without anyone realizing it.
Cándido Discovers the Truth
Their problems become worse when private investigator Jaime Contreras arrives in town. He has been hired by Cornelia Aguirre’s sons and is looking for one of Ulises’s aliases, Leonardo Lagos. Inés thinks quickly, inventing a story that Ulises and Perla have secretly been involved for years. Contreras accepts the explanation and leaves.
Unfortunately, Cándido returns earlier than expected after his car is damaged by a bull belonging to local farmer Filomeno Gallegos. After speaking with the investigator and Inés’s friend Marisol Medina, Cándido pieces together the truth about Ulises.
During the festival of San Fidel de las Cumbres, Ulises and Inés finally give in to the attraction that has been growing between them and have sex in an alley. But Cándido soon corners Inés with what he knows. He demands 20,000 pesos, insists that Ulises leave town, and expects sexual favors from Inés as part of the bargain. Otherwise, he will expose them.
Inés pretends to agree.
She arranges to meet Cándido in his car and spikes his flask with floripondio, or angel’s trumpet tea. Once he is drugged, she hits him in the head with a rock. Ulises joins her, and together they drive Cándido to a mountain precipice called the Devil’s Chair, intending to dispose of him.
But Cándido suddenly regains consciousness. He attacks Ulises and pins him down by the throat. Inés intervenes, and together she and Ulises repeatedly strike Cándido with a rock until he is dead.
They put his body back into the car and push it over the cliff. The plan does not go perfectly—the car becomes lodged on a rock ledge instead of disappearing into the chasm—but Cándido is dead.
When the wreck and body are recovered, young police officer Bartolo, who has feelings for Inés, considers opening an investigation. Inés nudges him toward a more convenient explanation: perhaps Cándido was devastated because Perla married someone else and deliberately drove over the cliff. Wanting to spare the town a scandal, Bartolo lets the matter rest.
Inés Remembers What Perla Did
By now, Ulises wants out. Perla’s money is difficult to access, she has fired the houseboy Fito, and she expects her new husband to take over duties as chauffeur and handyman. Worse, Ulises knows every additional day in Puerco Ahogado increases the chance that their crimes will be uncovered.
While Perla is at church, he steals her cash and jewelry and prepares to flee north without Inés.
Inés soon realizes he has betrayed her, but she has a larger problem waiting at home. Cándido left behind a letter exposing her partnership with Ulises, and Perla has found it.
The confrontation between aunt and niece becomes vicious. As Perla insults her, something finally breaks through the barrier in Inés’s memory. She remembers being ten years old. She remembers her mother on the stairs.
And she remembers Perla pushing her.
Inés finally understands that the nightmares she has carried for years are memories of witnessing Perla murder Encarnación.
She tells her aunt she is leaving for good.
Perla responds by pulling a gun.
Ulises and Inés Escape Together
Ulises, meanwhile, has changed his mind about abandoning Inés. He returns to the guesthouse and calls for her just as the confrontation turns violent.
Inés tackles Perla. The gun fires and grazes her, and Perla smashes a glass against her head. Bleeding, Inés runs with Ulises while Perla pursues them through the house with the gun.
Then Diógenes, Professor Nepomuceno’s dog, darts across the landing.
Perla trips over him and tumbles headfirst down the grand staircase—the same way Encarnación died after Perla pushed her years before.
Ulises scoops up the injured Inés, takes Diógenes with them, and drives away in Perla’s car. This time, he does not leave Inés behind. Whatever began as a business arrangement between two criminals has become a genuine partnership, and they disappear from Puerco Ahogado together.
Three Years Later
The story jumps ahead to 1946.
Bartolo travels to Mexico City to buy a suit for his upcoming marriage to Gertrudis, the butcher’s daughter. Puerco Ahogado has never fully recovered from the scandals surrounding Cándido, Ulises, and the Incláns.
Perla survived her fall, but she was permanently injured and now walks with a limp. During a three-day delirium afterward, she confessed to murders, and she has since withdrawn from society and lives as a recluse.
Walking through Mexico City, Bartolo suddenly hears a familiar laugh.
Across the street he sees Inés.
She is almost unrecognizable from the trapped young woman who once served guests in her aunt’s house. Elegantly dressed in a vivid red dress and fur stole, she is entering an expensive restaurant. Bartolo cannot bring himself to cross the street and approach her, so he turns away into the rain.
Inside, Inés joins Ulises in a secluded booth. They are impeccably dressed, drinking martinis, and completely at ease with each other. The arrangement Inés originally demanded has finally become reality: she and Ulises are equal partners.
Together, they now run sophisticated and highly profitable lonely-hearts scams, using the same kind of deceptive correspondence that once brought Ulises to Puerco Ahogado. As they flirt and dictate their latest fraudulent letter, they are already preparing for their next adventure.
This time, they are heading to Havana.
🔚 Ending Explained
How the Book Ends
The ending begins with Ulises betraying Inés—or at least trying to. While Puerco Ahogado is distracted by Sunday church and social visits, he steals the cash and jewelry from Perla’s desk, takes her car, and heads north toward Tampico, intending to escape alone.
Back at the estate, Inés confronts Perla, believing Ulises has already gotten away. But Perla has discovered the truth about them. Before his death, Cándido Sotomayor wrote her a letter revealing that Inés and Ulises were lovers and had been conspiring to scam her. Perla lashes out, calling Inés a bastard and a parasite, while Inés finally fights back, condemning her aunt’s hypocrisy and declaring that she is leaving the guesthouse for good.
That threat terrifies Perla more than the con itself. Faced with the prospect of being abandoned in the crumbling family estate, Perla pulls a gun on Inés and cries that Inés cannot leave her alone.
Those words finally unlock the memory Inés has suppressed since childhood. She remembers what really happened to her mother, Encarnación: Perla deliberately pushed her down the grand staircase and killed her.
Meanwhile, Ulises has a change of heart. Rather than continuing his escape, he turns around and comes back for Inés. Hearing him call her name distracts Perla long enough for Inés to tackle her. A violent struggle follows. Perla smashes a glass against Inés’s temple and fires the gun, wounding her.
Inés and Ulises flee down the hallway while Perla pursues them with the gun. Then Diógenes, Professor Nepomuceno’s dog, suddenly races across the landing and trips Perla.
Perla tumbles down the same grand staircase where she murdered Encarnación.
Ulises gathers up the injured Inés and Diógenes, and the three escape in Perla’s car. As they drive away from Puerco Ahogado and its oppressive fog, Ulises jokingly casts himself as a prince from The Arabian Nights and the car as their magic carpet. This time, however, Inés is not merely being rescued: she and Ulises leave as equal partners.
The Epilogue
Three years later, in 1946, young police officer Bartolo travels to Mexico City to buy a wedding suit before marrying Gertrudis, the butcher’s daughter.
Through him, we learn what became of Perla. She survived the staircase fall, but her leg was permanently injured and she now walks with her father’s cane. During a three-day feverish delirium after the accident, she confessed to her crimes, including the murders of her sister and niece. Her carefully maintained reputation was destroyed. She now lives alone and embittered inside the deteriorating estate she once fought so desperately to preserve.
While walking through rainy Mexico City, Bartolo hears a familiar laugh. Across the street he sees an almost unrecognizable Inés, beautifully dressed in a vivid red gown and fur stole as she leaves an expensive restaurant. Bartolo is too intimidated to approach her and retreats into the rain.
Inside the restaurant, Inés joins Ulises in a private booth. The two are impeccably dressed, drinking martinis and operating a highly successful version of the lonely-hearts schemes they once struggled to pull off. Their relationship has evolved into a genuine partnership: they flirt, joke, work together, and dictate their next fraudulent letter.
And they are already looking toward their next adventure.
They are going to Havana.
Ending Explained
The ending is ultimately about escape, reinvention, and the collapse of false respectability. The novel doesn’t conclude by reforming Inés and Ulises or punishing them for becoming criminals. Instead, it allows its morally dubious antiheroes to escape the suffocating world that tried to define them and create identities entirely on their own terms.
The Staircase and Perla’s Downfall
The grand staircase completes the novel’s most important circle. Years earlier, Perla used it to destroy Encarnación when she tried to escape. At the climax, Perla herself falls down those same stairs while trying to prevent Encarnación’s daughter from escaping.
The repetition is especially powerful because Inés survives where her mother did not. She effectively completes Encarnación’s unfinished escape.
Perla’s punishment is also fittingly incomplete. She doesn’t die. Instead, she is left physically damaged and socially disgraced, trapped inside the estate whose status and legacy mattered so much to her. The house that functioned as Inés’s prison ultimately becomes Perla’s.
Even Diógenes’s role carries a wonderfully dark irony. The proud matriarch is finally brought down not by another member of the aristocracy but by Professor Nepomuceno’s dog—an animal she regarded as an unwanted nuisance. Something small and beneath her notice becomes the instrument of her downfall.
Inés Finally Becomes Herself
Inés’s transformation is the heart of the ending. For much of the novel, she exists in a state of suppression: her childhood trauma is literally inaccessible to her, while Perla controls how she dresses, behaves, and understands herself.
Remembering Perla murdering Encarnación destroys the false version of her family history that has imprisoned her.
Her appearance in the epilogue therefore matters enormously. The woman in the bright red dress is almost the visual opposite of the subdued young woman trapped at Puerco Ahogado. Red evokes blood and danger, but also passion, confidence, sexuality, and visibility. Inés is no longer trying to disappear.
She hasn’t become conventionally “good.” She has become self-determined.
Why Ulises Comes Back
Ulises’s most important decision isn’t escaping Puerco Ahogado. It’s turning around.
Until that moment, his instinct is self-preservation. He steals the valuables, takes the car, and runs. Returning for Inés shows that their relationship has become more than another transaction or con.
The epilogue confirms that change. Neither dominates the other. They have discovered that their particular talents work better together, and their romantic relationship has become intertwined with a professional criminal partnership.
The novel therefore twists the traditional romantic ending: Inés doesn’t get rescued by a respectable man and absorbed into conventional domestic life. She gets the partner who helps her become an even better con artist.
Fog, Mexico City, and Havana
The geography reinforces that transformation. Puerco Ahogado’s fog and chipichipi embody stagnation, secrecy, memory, and suffocation. Its characters are surrounded by things that refuse to disappear: old grudges, old money, old crimes, old houses, and old expectations.
Inés and Ulises are defined by movement instead.
First they escape Puerco Ahogado. Then they reinvent themselves in cosmopolitan Mexico City. By the final scene, they’re already planning to move outward again, this time toward Havana.
They refuse the permanence that destroys Perla.
Bartolo as Inés’s Foil
Bartolo’s brief appearance provides one final contrast. He sees what Inés has become but doesn’t cross the street to speak to her. He returns instead to the respectable, predictable future waiting for him.
The ending doesn’t necessarily condemn Bartolo’s choice, but it places his conventional trajectory beside Inés’s radically unconventional one. He belongs to the social order Inés escaped; she has moved beyond its boundaries.
What the Ending Ultimately Means
At its core, the ending overturns the distinction between respectability and corruption.
Perla spends her life clinging to family name, class, propriety, and appearances, yet underneath that façade she is a murderer who has abused and controlled the people closest to her. Inés and Ulises are openly dishonest—they make their living deceiving strangers—but they are capable of loyalty, affection, humor, and genuine partnership.
That contradiction gives the ending its deliciously noirish quality.
There is no conventional moral reckoning in which the criminals repent and settle down. Perla loses everything she tried to preserve, while Inés and Ulises get away with it. They finish the novel glamorous, wealthy, in love, and plotting their next con.
Most importantly, Inés finally accomplishes what her mother could not: she gets out of the house, out of Puerco Ahogado, and out from under Perla’s control.
The final destination of Havana makes the conclusion feel less like an ending than the beginning of another scheme. Inés and Ulises haven’t found stability—and they don’t want it. They’ve found freedom through perpetual reinvention, disappearing into another city where they can become whoever their next con requires them to be.
👤 Characters & Fates
🔶 Main Characters
🔷 Supporting Characters
🕳️ Potential Plot Holes
After witnessing her mother Encarnación’s fatal fall down the stairs at age ten, Inés stops speaking from trauma. However, the novel gives two different durations for her mutism. Early on, the narration says she did not speak for weeks, while Inés later tells Ulises, “I couldn't talk for a year after that. Not a peep.” Unless the earlier account is meant to reflect unreliable family recollections, this is a direct timeline inconsistency.
Professor Nepomuceno accidentally drinks the sherry that Inés and Ulises poisoned with haba de San Ignacio, yet Dr. Carrel concludes that he died from sleeping pills after finding pills and a pharmacy receipt. This is difficult to reconcile with the expected effects of the poison, which contains strychnine-like compounds capable of causing severe muscle spasms and convulsions. Even if the exact cause were initially missed, the doctor’s certainty—and the failure to examine the spilled sherry or investigate other possible causes—makes the convenient overdose conclusion questionable.
Ulises repeatedly smashes Cándido in the face with a heavy rock before placing his body in his car and pushing it over a cliff. The car does not fall far into the chasm, however; it becomes lodged on a ledge only several meters below. When Cándido's body is recovered, Dr. Carrel and the police nevertheless accept an accidental crash as the likely explanation. Given the concentrated, severe blunt-force trauma to his face, particularly after such a relatively limited fall, it is difficult to believe an experienced army surgeon would not at least question whether some of the injuries occurred before the crash.
During the climax, Perla fires two unsuppressed gunshots inside the guesthouse before falling down the stairs. Despite the shots occurring inside a building in a small, quiet town, nobody appears to investigate or respond immediately. It is possible that few people were nearby on the Sunday afternoon, but the complete lack of reaction makes the escape considerably easier for Inés and Ulises and is never specifically accounted for.
📚 Book Club Q&A's
⭐ Final Rating & Thoughts
Silvia Moreno-Garcia finally got me! After not enjoying The Bewitching or The Seventh Veil of Salome, I was beginning to think her books simply weren’t for me. Then The Intrigue came along and completely changed my mind.
This is film noir on paper: atmospheric, morally messy, darkly funny, and filled with con artists, manipulation, questionable decisions, and characters who are absolutely not good people—but are ridiculously fun to follow. The fog-drenched 1940s Mexican setting is fantastic, and Moreno-Garcia’s sharp, wry prose fits the story perfectly.
What surprised me most was how compulsively readable I found it. The pacing is deliberate without ever feeling slow, the tension steadily builds, and every new scheme or complication pulled me further in. I especially loved the dynamic between Inés and Ulises; their shifting partnership gives the story much of its humor, tension, and energy.
I’m genuinely surprised by the mixed reception this has received. If you enjoy historical noir, con artists, morally gray characters, and watching increasingly terrible decisions spiral spectacularly out of control, this is an absolute blast.
✨ Adaptation description
Screen Adaptation
As of September 2026, no film or television adaptation of The Intrigue has been officially announced.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2026 historical noir novel was published by Del Rey on July 14, 2026. Set in 1940s Mexico, the story follows Ulises Linares, a handsome con artist who romances women through the mail in order to steal their money. His latest scheme takes him to the small town of Puerco Ahogado, where his intended victim’s niece, Inés, discovers what he is doing—and decides she wants in.
Although Moreno-Garcia has had other novels pursued for screen adaptations, there is currently no production company, director, cast, release date, or film/television project attached to The Intrigue.
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