I was eagerly waiting this book after falling in love with Silvia Moreno-Garcia's writing in Mexican Gothic and Gods of Jade and Shadow and I was not disappointed. The story is very different, but equally engaging, immersive, and readable. I really enjoy that Silvia Moreo-Garcia's books all feel new and fresh instead of the same story and genre repackaged into a new book.

Velvet Was the Night does a beautiful job catching the mood of Mexico City, a city I fell in love with while living there. I enjoyed reading about places I've been and seeing expressions that are true to the way people speak in Mexico City.

I will say, the use of the word f*g by a supporting character felt unnecessary and I would have preferred it was not included in the story. While I understand that this is very likely how some men would have spoken during this time period, it wouldn't have taken away from the scene to use a less derogatory term.

This author did a wonderful job with this novel, it is tense, the characterization and pacing are intriguing, and it's a fast paced ride from start to finish.

Going into this, I didn't have a great concept of what noir was. All I knew was that SMG has never once let me down, and that I really need to branch out more.

If you're expecting a romance like The Beautiful Ones, understand that this isn't it. Velvet Was the Night is graphic, violent, and unflinching in its rendition of Maite and Elvis's stories. I say stories plural because, again, this isn't a romance. The main characters are completely separated from one another, and truly do act as different lenses through which to view the events of the story.

As always, I have to commend SMG for spectacular world building and adding to her already diverse set of novels. It's wonderful to find an author who just clicks with you, regardless of what she chooses to write.

I will warn readers that the plot feels like it's moving slowly at various points and that the characters do things that would certainly break the rules of conduct if this were a romance. If you're questioning whether this will be your cup of tea or not, I recommend reading SMG's post on the book. She gives a description of noir and provides some helpful links.

Many thanks to NetGalley and to Random House Publishing Group for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I loved Mexican Gothic but I could NOT make it through this one. Barely made it to 25% and I had to DNF it. I just couldn’t get into it. So sad

Thanks to Netgalley and Ballentine Del Rey for the ARC of this in exchange for my honest review.

If you like noir, don’t let my review put you off reading this.

I didn’t love this, but I think it was entirely my fault. I found Mexican Gothic super weird, and when I saw the author had another book I was really intrigued. However, I don’t think I’ve actually read any noir before this! I think I might been more interested if I knew more about the time period and situations being talked about, but I just didn’t really connect with either main character and I didn’t really get any of the budding relationships.

This was like nothing I have read before. An engaging noir that is full of rich history. I loved all of the interaction between the characters. The story kept me engaged and I loved the references to the times.

Amongst civil and political unrest in Mexico during the 1970s, a woman is searching for her neighbor but little does she know how many people are searching for her neighbor. Velvet was the Night is a noir novel so it isn't fair to call it a thriller. As a noir, the pacing of the novel is extremely slow, which I didn't care for. I know noirs can be slower but this one was too slow. The majority of the action happens during the last 10% of the novel.

Although I love the ambiance of Mexico during this time and Silvia's writing it wasn't enough to save this novel for me. I didn't find myself invested in the characters in the novel but kept going to find out what happened to Leonora, the neighbor. Elvis and Maite both felt flat and one dimensional in their characterization. I didn't know about the political and civil unrest occurring in Mexico during this time so I'm grateful for learning about something new. If you want some ambiance when you read, Silvia also has a Spotify playlist of books that will set the mood for the time and space of this novel.

I don't think this will be a novel everyone will enjoy but those that do will love it. Although I didn't love this novel I'll still read anything Silvia writes because I love her writing.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel is set in Mexico during the 1970s. It follows the story of a daydreaming secretary, Maite, as she searches for her free-spirited neighbor, Leonora. Maite is a lonely woman in her late 20s who has lived a lifetime of a disapproving mother, a sister who can do no wrong and a broken heart from her last crush. She reads romance graphic novels and dreams of a life a bit more adventurous. Well adventurous it soon becomes.

The novel also follows Elvis, a member of Hawk, a group of individuals who take orders from El Mago. Elvis also is looking for Leonora but for other reasons. The story intertwines these character’s journeys in a thrilling and quintessentially noir manner.

Will Leonora be found? Was she kidnapped? Did she run away? If so, why? These questions fuel the plot.

This was one of my favorite novels of the year. I loved it from beginning to end. I was so interested with the characters and was jetted away to the setting. Even if you aren’t an aficionado of noirs give this one a go.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC.

This is the 4th book of hers that I’ve read and it was once again a major HIT! This slow burn noir was so different than her past books, which tend to have a lot of fantasy elements, but it was awesome to read nonetheless.

I took a class in college on classic noir, with authors such as Dashiell Hammond and Raymond Chandler. I didn’t exactly fall in love with the genre then, but Silvia’s fresh take on noir with Velvet Was the Night has me totally rethinking it. I loved the psychological focus of the novel and how it felt like I was transported to Mexico City. All the emotions were so intensified, lending to an air of suspense throughout. As I read, I even pictured everything in my head in black and white — it just felt classic, like The Big Sleep.

I also found Maite to be such a well developed character. What I love most about all of Silvia’s books are her female leads. Each one is so different from the next, but they all carry the plot so well and rise up despite their imperfections, each so memorable, including Maite. I also enjoyed Elvis, who I sort of fell in love with! He’s not your typical bookish BF by any means, but somehow I couldn’t help but cheer him on.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is definitely an auto buy author for me, and this one was not a disappointment! I’ll probably always lean toward her SFF books more, but this one really brought a breath of fresh air to the noir genre and helped me appreciate it so much more as a whole.

This isn't your typical noir, or even pulp, and is certainly not a guaranteed like for those who read Mexican Gothic. This was a solid read, with good pacing and character development. Noir and pulp tend to come with rough language, gritty, often irredeemable characters, and innocents manipulated by others. Usually the manipulator is a femme fatale, but here it is shared out between three secondary male characters. The story unfolds around our two naifs, Elvis and Maite. Their paths come closer throughout the book, but for the vast majority of the time, their narratives remain separate. It is always easy to tell which perspective you are in, and it was not confusing in any way.

Elvis is likeable in an anti-hero sort of way. The loss of the star is for Maite. I found her grating and would deflate a little every time it was time for her part of the story. The development of both characters revolves around dreams - ideas of what they want life to be like vs what it is. All within the context of political turmoil and Mexico's Dirty War. **If you dont know anything about the Dirty War, you may want to skim up on it beforehand. It will be a good story without it, but is something more with it.

Thank you to Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Del Rey, and Netgalley for an advance ecopy in exchange for an honest opinion.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia continues to amaze me with her ability to make me feel like she writes for me. I always identify to a significant extent with her heroines. I don't think I am as sad and broken as Naomi and yet I identified with her romanticism and her independence. Elvis was also written with such care and nuance that I really felt like I understood him even as he was making choices I did not like. The story was incredibly engaging and the history was beautifully handled. I want to see more books like this, that engage with the history of violence against students and protesters in Mexico. I am still surprised at how many people don't know about the Tlatelolco massacre. As a historian, this is a topic that I make a point of teaching in my classes and the way that Moreno-Garcia engages with that history is just brilliant. I cannot say enough good things about Velvet was the night.

I will be filming a video review for my channel, a video for TikTok, and an Instagram live on the history that is used in the book.

Velvet was the Night is a noir novel that follows Elvis and Maite as they both investigate the same disappearance. Maite, who is bored with her life as a secretary for a law firm and escapes her reality by reading romance comics, lives across from Leonora, who asks Maite to cat sit for her. When she doesn't return, Maite tries to find out what happened to her.

Elvis is a member of The Hawks, a group run by the government who squashed student protests in the 70s. When it is learned that Leonora has photos the government doesn't want shared, Elvis' boss El Mago sends him and his unit to find the woman and get those pictures. He starts to tail Maite and develops an obsession with her.

The story unfolds in the POVs of both Elvis and Maite as they investigate what happened to Leonora. Each character has their own chapter, so it's never confusing. The characters are well developed by Noir standards. Maite was very unlikable and I find myself dreading those chapters that featured her. The writing is good, but I think the dialogue could have been a bit better.

The history of the political climate, the Dirty War, and the student protests weren't fully explained until the author's note at the end. Which left me a bit lost, but not so much that it detracted from my enjoyment of the book. There is a quite a lot of swearing, so if that bothers you, please be aware of that. Overall, I found it to be a solid, atmospheric read that I would recommend for those who like noir or a good historical crime novel.

Thank you to Del Rey, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and NetGalley for gifting me a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

In her after forward Silvia Morena-Garcia explains that Velvet Was The Night is noir, pulp fiction but it is based on a real horror story. Set in 1971 in Mexico City, the story marks the Corpus Christi Massacre when a shock group funded and organised by the Mexican government attacked a student march. The Hawks (Los Hacones) had been trained by the authorities with the support of the CIA for the purpose of suppressing dissent and communist sentiments. This marked the beginning of the start of the Dirty War which lasted a decade and saw many Mexican citizens abducted, tortured, incarcerated and murdered. Prior to this the government had also closed all ‘singing cafes’ as they claimed modern music fomented rebellion and anti-nationalist views.

Velvet Was The Night follows the point of view of two separate characters. The first that we meet calls himself Elvis. He has been recruited to The Hawks by its leader El Mago. Elvis and his colleagues were required to look like students so they could inform on activities of dissenting or communist sympathetic students. Despite working in a violent and macho environment, Elvis is a sympathetic character who has made a real friend in the Hawks called El Gazpacho, and enjoys listening to rock ‘n’ roll and reading books. Indeed one of the reasons he looks up to El Mago is due to his book and record collections. On a holy day, the feast of Corpus Christi they are required to disrupt a student march. This involved destroying any photographic footage which might capture The Hawks in action. The day’s resultant chaos leaves the remaining Hawks to lie low as the press are keen to discover if President Echeverria’s forces were somehow involved in the multiple deaths and casualties.



Our second narrator is Maite Jaramillo, a 30 year old single legal secretary. Living a bored life, Maite is dissatisfied with her job, struggles to afford to pay for her apartment and cannot cover the repairs to her car. Her enjoyment comes from music, books and her particular love of romantic comics. Indeed Maite is a fantascist who imagines living out some of scenarios with the male characters from these stories; and even replaces some imagined experiences with one of her work colleagues. One day she encounters her rich and attractive neighbour Leonora. The younger girl informs her that she is leaving the city for the weekend and could she feed her cat over that time. Yet such a seemingly innocuous request turns into so much more when Leonora fails to return and Maite unexpected starts to find herself in embroiled a search for her missing neighbour.

Maite meets the handsome and wealthy in appearance Emilio outside Leonora’s apartment claiming to be missing his camera before encountering dissident Rubén. Making an associate for her favourite fiction she was left to consider:
“Though Leonora’s appearance had irked Maite, it now excited her. It guaranteed her escape from the boredom. Nothing like this had happened to her, after all. It was like opening a new issue of a comic book. Who were Rubén and Emilio – what role would they play in the story?”
The two perspectives Moreno-Garcia gives us successfully work in parallel when Elvis is also charged to locate Leonora by El Mago. Hidden from Maite are the darker goings on when Elvis and two fellow Hawks rough up a priest before he is given the order to follow her. However she is spooked when she is visited at work by Mateo Anaya from the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS) - the secret police – for her association with ‘subversive elements’ – yet another character looking to establish the whereabouts of her missing neighbour. Around a similar time Elvis meets a member of intelligence service DGIPS (rivals to the DFS) who warns him to get out of The Hawks and proposes to him that he applies to join them. Already questioning his life choices, some key scenes occur when Elvis is following Maite. He wonders how his life would be if he was to go out with girls to public places: “it was never him and a girl, together, out like this, drinking and eating while the jukebox plays its tunes.”
While there are many characters and subplots essentially the story concerns the whereabouts of missing Leonora and where she has hidden the photo films and the self discoveries of Elvis and Maite. It succeeds on both levels making this an absorbing story.
After one grisly discovery and the eventual unearthing of the missing film, the pace speeds up to an exciting conclusion which sees a day of reckoning for some of the characters and a new beginning for others. Velvet Was The Night is a really enjoyable read due to Morena-Garcia creation of characters that the reader really does care about. Despite being on different sides of the story, you find you can root for both Elvis and Maite. The novel also successfully captures the best and worst sight and, sounds of 1970s Mexico. Daily discussions by Mexican citizens show the large degree that people are divided between their support for the president’s government and that of revolutionaries. A wave of fear is created when ordinary people are contacted by the state authorities. A Spotify playlist provided with the novel also features some fantastic rock and soul songs which help add to the flavour created in some of the Mexican dinners, or indeed that Maite would lock herself away to enjoy.

While Morena-Garcia is well known for her horror and gothic novels, Velvet Was The Night and earlier novel Untamed Shore more than testify her ability to write a really gripping noir story. She is careful to define her story as a noir novel rather than a thriller and she pays homage to the older Mexican noir writers – this is a reminder to me to read the first Mexican noir writer Rafael Bernal as I have a copy of The Mongolian Conspiracy from 1969. Highly recommended both for existing fans of the author and for crime fiction readers.

I was not able to finish this book—so much swearing and it was not my taste at all. I really loved Mexican Gothic but this book is completely different. Just not for me. Thanks for the opportunity.

I loved Mexican Gothic so much that SMG has become an auto read author for me, therefore, I went into this novel fairly blind. Unfortunately, this was nothing like Mexican Gothic and it’s safe to say this genre isn’t for me. This novel was almost a DNF for me but ultimately I am glad I stuck with it because it was an entertaining read. It would translate to the big screen very well!

Maite is a homely secretary bored with her job and her life. She can’t seem to make ends meet and finds her happiness between the pages of romance comics. Maite is cat sitting for her glamorous neighbor when it becomes apparent that her neighbor is missing. Looking for a little thrill, Maite decides to try to track down Leonora and unknowingly throws herself directly into the center of a dangerous political conspiracy.

Elvis is a member of the Hawks - an offshoot government agency tasked with destroying evidence collected by the rebels. It comes to his teams’ attention that Leonora has damning photographs and he sets out to find her before she can release them. In searching for Leonora, he begins following Maite and starts to form an obsession with her.

The novel alternates between Maite and Elvis and their respective stories. I didn’t feel connected to either character and found Maite whiny and obnoxious (and I was really sick of hearing how unattractive she was). Elvis’ story felt like an action film which was entertaining but not really my style. The book was also far more political than I expected which was interesting but also not something I would typically choose to read about.

Overall this was a well written and intriguing and entertaining story, it just wasn’t for me. SMG is clearly a very talented writer and I was impressed with just how different this novel was from Mexican Gothic. I’m interested in checking out her other books now!! However, I wouldn’t suggest going into this one blind if you’re an SMG fan.

Thank you to Ballantine/ Del Rey and NetGalley for the copy of this novel.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about Velvet Was the Night.. on the one hand, it's an interesting story with a great setting, 1970's Mexico City, but it just didn't wow me like I thought it would. It started off so slow that I almost gave up reading it. Maite was a hard character to like and I didn't care for her at all. Elvis was a great character tho. I did enjoy his character alot.. I was really really thrown off by all the "El" names: El Mago, El Elvis, El Guerro, etc.. It was just too much. Maybe I had higher hopes because I've really enjoyed Silvia Moreno-Garcia's other books. This just wasn't for me but I'm sure many others will enjoy it.

This was not my typical read, but because I'm a Moreno-Garcia fan I felt like I was in good hands, and turns out I was. I loved this book, especially for its unusual and unique setting (both place and time period) - I mean how many books do we get set in 1970's Mexico? I absolutely loved the noir and nostalgic elements of the story, those details really brought the characters and plot to full life. Maite and Elvis' love of music and the particular songs mentioned (the playlist at the end was a great bonus), and their eventual meet cute over a Juke Box was superb and poignant amongst all the tension and action at that point.

And while I found Maite interesting I didn't particularly like her, especially through the first half (but I may have warmed to her a little by the end). But Elvis was a favorite of mine from the very beginning, he was just such a great great character, maybe even a little deceptively simple, he's become a memorable hero for me. The noir/crime vibes combined with the political intrigue were the perfect frame for these two quirky and fascinating, but very "real" characters. Highly recommend, especially for those who like something a little different, or for those fans of Crime/Noir vibes.

**Thank you to both NetGalley and Del Rey for my eARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!**

I enjoyed Mexican Gothic and loved Gods of Jade and Shadow, so I was really looking forward to this one! But it just was not my cup of tea. I wasn't a huge fan of the writing for some reason, I didn't connect well with the characters, and I just didn't enjoy it, unfortunately. I do plan on reading more from Silvia Moreno-Garcia in the future, though.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'll start by saying that I'm a big fan of Silvia Moreno-Garcia! I've read Untamed Shore and Mexican Gothic, and I enjoyed them both. I'm also a big fan of noirs (took a course on noir film in college for fun!). So between those two things, I was really looking forward to this one, and it didn't disappoint.

Velvet Was the Night is a 1970s noir set in Mexico City. Maite investigates the disappearance of her neighbor Leonora. While looking into it, she runs across Emilio and Ruben, along with Asterisk, a collective trying to cause political change in Mexico. We also follow Elvis, a member of the Hawks who is also tasked with trying to find Leonora. The mystery unfolds from there, and everything culminates in a really interesting way.

This book worked for me on the whole, but since my dayjob is editing, I caught a few things that I hope get caught before it's finalized. I look forward to reading more of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, her new releases and her backlist.

Velvet Was the Night will definitely be enjoyed by many but it was just not for me. It was written so well and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t find myself invested in the story.