Billed as a mystery, a macabre and “sensational” crime story, and “as a watershed moment…that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order” in Spanish Colonial America, this book offers much more than such hyped-up promises. It is more significant for its method than for its history (or even for its framework as an Agatha Christie–style whodunit.)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, in newly established Guatemala City, mutilated body parts began appearing on the windowsills of prominent citizens. They came from bodies in the local cemetery attached to a religiously run hospital at the edge of town, and from a morgue adjacent to the hospital. The local authorities attempted to discover not only who was responsible but also why he (the local magistrates at the time, like Sellers-Garcia, make that gendered assumption) was morbidly obsessed with the breasts, vulvas, ears, and hands of women, crudely...