In the Mouth of the Wolf

A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press

By: Katherine Corcoran

Narrated by: Gigi Saul Guerrero

Length: 12 hrs

Publisher's summary

Former AP Mexico bureau chief Katherine Corcoran’s pulsating investigation into the murder of a legendary woman journalist on the verge of exposing government corruption in Mexico.

Regina Martínez was no stranger to retaliation. A journalist out of Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, Regina's stories for the magazine Proceso laid out the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. She was barred from press conferences, and copies of Proceso often disappeared before they made the newsstands. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption and two Veracruz politicians, and the magazine went missing once again, she was bludgeoned to death in her bathroom. The message was clear: No journalist in Mexico was safe.

Katherine Corcoran, then leading the Associated Press coverage of Mexico, admired Regina Martínez’s work. Troubled by the news of her death, Corcoran journeyed to Veracruz to find out what had happened. Regina hadn’t even written the controversial article. But did she have something else that someone didn’t want published? Once there, Katherine bonded with four of Regina’s grief-stricken mentees, each desperate to prove who was to blame for the death of their friend. Together they battled cover-ups, narco-officials, red tape, and threats to sift through the mess of lies—and discover what got Regina killed.

A gripping look at reporters who dare to step on the deadly “third rail,” where the state and organized crime have become indistinguishable, In the Mouth of the Wolf confronts how silencing the free press threatens basic protections and rule of law across the globe.

©2022 Katherine Corcoran (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Excellent read

A great delivery of a difficult subject. I also learned a lot about Mexican politics, culture and history as well

A Brave Reporter

Katherine Corcoran is a brave reporter, risking her life in what she portrays as a corrupt, lawless and dangerous Mexico to determine who killed Regina Martinez, another investigative reporter. Corcoran is smart and relentless in pursuing the truth, and you can’t help but admire her. But much of the book left me discouraged, almost despairing. The government officials and their henchmen (and women) are too brutal, too quick to murder any reporter who might expose their schemes. The death toll of journalists just keeps mounting, year by year. The main hope is that there are always more courageous journalists, native Mexicans who are patriotic and loyal enough to risk their own lives in search of the truth. One drawback was the plethora of Mexican names, unfamiliar to me, which made it hard to remember which person was which.

Mixture

The story is very instructive if you want to be a reporter or detective. Wow what a slog. But all the minutia makes it hard to keep up. Needed a strong editors hand. However I learned a TON about MX politics. Worse than I knew. The narration IS bad. So many mispronounced words! An important story. Reporting is hard. I learned that.

Fascinating

It’s horrendous that things like this happen in this day and age. I hope this is one day resolved, but I don’t think that’s realistic to expect. Corcoran does a good job telling a cohesive story that she’s only learned in bits and pieces.

fascinating story ruined by bad narration

The author, a native English-speaking American, states, "I tried to be transparent about the fact that I view things through a foreigner's lens." Inexplicably, however, the chosen narrator is clearly a native Spanish-speaker with what can charitably be described as an idiosyncratic, extremely distracting way of reading English: odd cadence, ill-timed pauses in almost every sentence, strange emphasis on conjunctions, personal pronouns, prepositions, and other random words, making the narration exteemely difficult to follow. And her melodramatic scenery-chewing only further obfuscates the meaning of the text. Much easier to understand if the listener bumps up the speed so all the weird pauses merge into the flow. Also, a pdf of the one-page list of personnel in the printed book is more or less essential to following the story but not included in the Audible version. Disappointing, and in places infuriating, production.

Terrible narration

This reader did no service to the book; in fact she detracted. She has the oddest cadence I've ever heard in a professional reader. In most sentences she punctuates the odd word, such as "and" and "I" and leaves long pauses before and after the word. It is almost impossible to listen without laughing.

This is an important story so why hire a bad reader? And why, when the author is American, choose a reader with a Spanish accent?

Booooo