Perfectly sized fiction and nonfiction for a coffee break, a trip to work, or an evening in. She lives in Central America.Ībout Byliner: Byliner partners with the world’s best authors to bring readers the right story for every moment and mood. She has written about science, natural history, and the environment, most recently for the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Wall Street Journal. Did she die in an act of long-deferred vengeance? Or had the lady Scarface become so soft and complacent that she now was an irresistible target?Ībout the Author: Jennie Erin Smith is the author of Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery (Crown, 2011). Her entrepreneurial cunning extended to ordering custom lingerie from Medellín tailors with hidden pockets for smuggling coke, and sending fleets of women to America to deliver it.Īfter serving a prison term in the United States, Blanco returned to Colombia for what appeared to be a genteel retirement, right up to the moment she took a bullet in the head outside a butcher shop. She also allegedly murdered-or ordered the murders of-her own husbands and former partners in crime. One man was bayoneted to death in an airport, and even a toddler was killed. Always immaculately coiffed and dripping with diamonds, she ordered horrific hits, torturing her enemies and then dispatching them with bullets and bombs.

Even by the ruthless standards of the drug wars, Blanco was in a league of her own. Smith was living in Medellín when Blanco was killed a year ago this month, and quickly immersed herself in the legend.

During her time living in New York, Miami, and California, as well as Medellín, she left dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies in her wake, earning a reputation as one of the most brutal female criminals of all time. For years, she ventured where no woman had gone before, dominating the cocaine trade between South America and the United States, rivaled only by her fellow Colombian and sworn enemy, Pablo Escobar. Her real name was Griselda Blanco, but she was known by many other, more evocative names: Black Widow, La Madrina, Queenpin. September 26, 2013-San Francisco-Today Byliner publishes Cocaine Cowgirl ($1.99), by celebrated journalist Jennie Erin Smith, a never before told story about the murder of the notorious “Godmother” of the U.S.-Colombia drug trade.

Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith