Montezuma Strip

Detective Angel Cardenas polices the crime-ridden US-Mexico borderlands in five futuristic stories from the New York Times–bestselling author.

A century in the future, greed flourishes on the Montezuma Strip, a string of high-tech that follows the old and frayed USA-Mexico border stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. First World technology meets Third World cheap labor, while both the rich and the poor fall into the widening chasm between them. In five stories set among the chaos, Tex-Mex cop Angel Cardenas puts his intuit ability to good use as a living lie-detector.


After being blinded on the job and then having his sight restored with an optic nerve transplant, Cardenas uses his heightened intuition to get to the truth, whether it's figuring out how two genius software designers were killed—with no visible causes of death—in "Sanctuary" or stopping a deadly heavenly vision (that could be a military-ware tactile projection) in "Our Lady of the Machine."


In three more stories—"Heartwired," "Gagrito," and "Hellado"—Cardenas learns that in a land where everything and everyone can be bought and sold, even justice has a price.

Praise for Alan Dean Foster

"A master storyteller." —SF Site

"One of the most consistently and fertile writers of science fiction and fantasy." —The Times (London)