Cargo of Orchids

Susan Musgrave's bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child.
Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel's wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme...