Our Lady of the Assassins

An ageing, embittered grammarian returns to the Medellín of the early 1990s, at the height of the cartel wars, and takes up with teenage sicarios, hired killers from the hillside slums, in a bitter lament for a city drowning in violence. Vallejo maps the real Medellín: the old churches of the centre he wanders in nostalgia, the comunas climbing the hills that breed the young gunmen, the metro that is the city's fragile pride, and the shrine at Sabaneta where the sicarios pray for their bullets to strike.

Fernando

The city centre (the churches)

The return

Home after decades abroad, Fernando drifts through the old churches of central Medellín, praying to the images of his childhood in a city he no longer recognises. His caustic, elegiac voice, half in love with the past and half with death, threads the whole book, a lament for language, faith and a country consumed by killing.

The opening

explicit The old churches of central Medellín, real landmarks of the city, are where the nostalgic grammarian Fernando wanders in mourning for a vanished Colombia; sited in the historic centre.

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