A confidence trick requires more than a convincing liar. It requires a theory about the person being deceived: what they want, what they fear, what they will overlook. In the premise of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Intrigue, that theory is itself unstable. A con man who believes he can read women discovers that his intended victim and her niece have intentions of their own. His confidence may be the most dangerous assumption in the room.
Published by Del Rey on July 14, 2026, the novel takes place in 1940s Mexico. Ulises uses romantic correspondence to pursue money, then travels to meet Perla, a boardinghouse owner in Veracruz. Her niece Inés recognizes his scheme and proposes participating in it. The publisher’s account makes clear that Perla is not the easily manipulated woman he imagines. That arrangement establishes a contest over knowledge before anyone can claim to control the outcome.
The setting matters because a boardinghouse joins private desire to a place where people conduct everyday business. Romance may promise escape or reinvention; a household still has boundaries, obligations and people who notice arrivals. Deception becomes harder to isolate when a proposed relationship affects more than two people. A story about a seducer therefore becomes a story about the assumptions that allow him to enter someone else’s life.
Noir has room for a sharp distinction between intelligence and understanding. A person can calculate the next move while misunderstanding the person across the table. The announced triangle in The Intrigue makes that distinction especially compelling. Treating another person as a category—lonely woman, useful accomplice, convenient obstacle—can produce a workable plan. It can also prevent the planner from seeing a motive that does not fit the role assigned to it.
Moreno-Garcia appeared alongside Hannah Whitten at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival on August 22. The event placed her latest work in a conversation about dark fiction. Here, the publisher’s premise makes danger intimate: attraction and ambition operate inside relationships where nobody possesses the whole account.
That is a promising reason to approach this Mexican noir beyond its familiar promise of twists. The interesting question is not simply whether the trick succeeds. It is what happens when someone mistakes a practiced performance of knowledge for knowledge itself. Ulises has a method, but the women he encounters are not blank spaces waiting for him to write their intentions. A confidence game becomes less comfortable when everyone at the table can read.