Journalistically speaking, Jorge Zepeda Patterson has accomplished everything: newspaper's managing editor, magazine founder, television anchor, newspaper political columnist and author of half a dozen books on current affairs. After spending decades researching and writing about political power, he found that only fiction could explain the way in which the brain of a politician works. Los Corruptores (2013), his first novel, was finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Award. His second novel, Milena (2014), won the $800,000 Premio Planeta. Born in Mazatlán, Mexico, in 1952, Zepeda received a master's degree from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales and a doctorate in political science from The Sorbonne. After his journalistic training at El País, he was the founding editor of the newspapers Siglo 21 and Público in Guadalajara, and was later editor-in-chief of El Universal. He has authored numerous books on political analysis, and his weekly column appears in over twenty newspapers in Mexico. He currently edits the news website SinEmbargo.mx.Adrian Nathan West is the author of the novel The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature. He lives between Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

“A Mexican journalist and political analyst who has spent decades covering the country's politics, crime and corruption turned to fiction as a way to shine a light on real-life stories that go unreported and ignored. The result is a searing, international bestseller about sexual and human trafficking that won Spanish-language literature's highest award and has now been published in English.… Patterson masterfully describes the brutality of one of the world's most profitable clandestine industries as Milena moves through Europe and the Americas.… Zepeda Patterson's journalistic experience comes through in the pages: Milena acts like a reporter, collecting the dark, twisted secrets of her powerful clients in a black notebook and compelling readers to appreciate the crudeness and magnitude of the global sex trade.”—Arturo Conde, NBC News Latino