Malayerba' is one of the most violent books that have been published in recent years, and also the most interesting, precise, extraordinary. It is the chronicle, necessarily fragmentary, of the violence of drug trafficking in the north of Mexico, or rather of the experience of that violent happening as it is manifested daily in that area of the country: the experience of the children, of the employees , of ordinary citizens; of incipient and heavy narcos. And it is also a powerful sound record of the infiltration of that terrible experience in the language of every day, in the speech of the street. With this book, Javier Valdés Cárdenas enters definitively into the history of the chronicle in Mexico, and he does it through the front door.