Before launching into the narrative, author Alicia Gaspar de Alba explains that the murders described in Desert Blood are real. The characters are fictional, but real cases inspired many of the novel’s details. Gaspar de Alba has “added a metaphorical dimension to the story, using the image of American coins particularly pennies, to signify the value of the victims in the corporate machine” (v). The victims are “poor brown women” who are “as expendable as pennies in the border economy” (v).

Gaspar de Alba seeks not to “sensationalize” or “capitalize on” the crimes (vi); rather, she hopes “to expose the horrors […] to the English-speaking public” and examine a “plausible explanation for the silence that has surrounded the murders” (vi).

A young woman, her body numbed from an injection kidnappers have given her, is dragged by the neck from the back of a car. She does not feel the wounds as they mutilate her, but she feels “a current of night air deep inside her” (2). When she attempts to scream, she is hit. As the kidnappers laugh, she hears singing.