Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera     {Reviewed by STELLA} I’ve been late to come to Herrera’s work, and now I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to get there. Herrera is a revelation. He has been feted as Mexico’s greatest living novelist and his third novel Signs Preceding the End of the World was awarded Best Translated Book Award in 2016, beating stiff and outstanding competition from Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The first novella in his ‘Border Trilogy’, Kingdom Cons has just been translated into English. Unusually, in the English translations, the last has come first and the first last. Loosely a trilogy, all the books (the second being The Transmigration of Bodies) deal with borders, physical, psychological and metaphysical. Kingdom Cons is fable-like in its construction, telling the story of the Artist, a wandering musician who sings songs for his supper, and the King, the Capo, the head of a palace, bejewelled and all powerful. The novella opens in the cantinas of Mexico where Lobo is singing popular ballads of humour and humility for a few coins. When a drunkard refuses to pay for his song, the King intervenes and the Artist finds himself taken into a powerful world of passion, violence and high-stakes jealousy. The world of the drug cartel is subtly played out in this tale; the story could as easily be any time or situation where inequalities thrive and those that play hardest and fastest climb to the top, only to watch with increasing paranoia for the knife to come. Lobo’s place in the palace is a lowly one, a place that protects him in its powerlessness but also leaves him vulnerable, yet he is increasingly intrigued by the machinations and power of the court. Accepted by the King initially as a harmless distraction, he later becomes an object of annoyance. His relationships with others in the power structure become increasingly complex, and his dangerous obsession with a beautiful, damaged young woman, the Commoner, compromise his former inconsequential existence. As defections occur and the King’s position becomes precarious, the tension mounts. When Lobo is sent on a mission to spy, he inadvertently makes a mistake, one that could crush him. Herrera’s ability to take you into this maelstrom of epic emotion and action is measured, holding you both aloft and completely compelled. His work deserves a second and close reading. In these slim volumes, he conjures up worlds and ideas that sideswipe you: dynamic and intelligent, they will hit you in both the gut and the mind.