Teresa Mendoza's boyfriend is a pilot the narcos of Sinaloa, Mexico, call "the king of the short runway," because he can get a plane full of cocaine off the ground in three hundred yards. But in a ruthless business, life is often short, and Teresa even has a special cell phone that Guero gave her, along with a dark warning: If that phone rings, it means he's dead, and she'd better run, because they're coming for her next.

Then the call comes.

In order to survive, she will have to say goodbye to the old Teresa, an innocent girl who once entrusted her life to a pinche narco smuggler. She will have to find inside herself a woman who is tough enough to inhabit a world as ugly and dangerous as that of the narcos. And indeed, the woman who emerges will surprise even those who know her legend, that of the Queen of the South.