SOURCE: Massing, Michael. “Goodfella.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (1 June 1997): 10-11.

In the following mixed review, Massing argues that News of a Kidnapping is a cogent and powerful account of the impact of drug trafficking on García Márquez's native Colombia.

Over the last 20 years, Latin America has been hit by scourges of many kinds, from leftist insurgencies and right-wing death squads to currency collapses and cholera epidemics. None, however, has been quite as insidious or corrosive as drug trafficking. El narcotrafio has filled morgues, bloated economies, spread addiction, turned schoolchildren into assassins and made judges into martyrs. So macabre and malevolent have been its effects that only a writer of unsurpassed descriptive powers could hope to do justice to them. And at long last, Latin America's most acclaimed writer has accepted the challenge. Gabriel García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude probably ranks...