A no holds barred portrait of the underbelly of the Columbian drug trade and a woman on death row . . .
Convicted of drug trafficking and infanticide, a woman is on death row counting down the days to her execution and watching as, one by one, her fellow inmates are gassed, hanged or lethally injected. How did she get here? This is her story.
The narrator is drawn into a web of drug-dealing torture and violence when she agrees to translate the story of a member of Las Blancas, a Columbian drug family. On a visit to the prison, she is kidnapped and held as hostage as Las Blancas shoot their way out of the prison.
They brutally smuggle her out of the country and back to Tranquilandia, an island off the coast of Columbia ruled by Las Blancas. She is imprisoned in a flooded, bug-ridden derelict hotel then in the cartel's luxurious estate, where she is plied with cocaine until she can barely breathe between her hits. Pregnant to one of the drug barons, she waits for the birth of her baby and for her own possible execution.
We know she survives, because the narrator tells her story from prison, where she waits on death row with her friends Rainy and Frenchy (the latter famous for the fact that she survived two attempts at execution and that it took three goes to electrocute her in the chair).
'Cargo Of Orchids' is a cracking good thriller, complete with car chases, illicit drug running (in cargoes of orchids!), and ruthless drug cartels bribing and bombing their way out of trouble and into bucket loads of money.
