¿Quién mató a Rosario Tijeras? Narco y culpa.

The novel Rosario Tijeras (Jorge Franco Ramos, 1999) is interpreted here from the perspective of the literary genre of the whodunnit. More particularly, the analysis investigates who is responsible for the murder of the female assassin. Taking into account the serious psychological instability of the narrator and the violations of the maxims of communicative cooperation, it is argued that he is an unreliable narrator. Such a reading of the novel as a detective story told by an unreliable narrator reveals a number of clues as to who murdered Rosario Tijeras. It also paves the way towards a new interpretation of the novel: this article argues that there is a parallelism between Franco Ramos’ novel and La virgen de los Sicarios (1994) by Fernando Vallejo: in both novels the issues of violence and guilt in societies dominated by drug trafficking are treated in a similar way.