Pablo Piccato has written a remarkable book. It develops a refreshing analytical and historical perspective on Mexico's fundamental dilemmas concerning the rule of law. The central focus is on the nexus of crime, truth, and justice and, more importantly, on how this nexus broke down in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result and in the face of new forms of urban crime and violence, a whole range of actors and institutions engage in manifold ways to restore a sense of connection among the three.Piccato's perspective is critical of state-centered approaches; hence the book examines a wide range of meanings and narratives produced by actors outside the state, including popular juries (jurados populares), nota roja journalists and readers (in the first section of the book), detectives, murderers, and pistoleros (in the second section), and crime fiction writers and readers (in the third section). They all contribute to the formation of “criminal literacy,” a form of practical knowledge about crime and the workings of the penal system required to comprehend and navigate modern urban life. Of course, all of this is based on citizens' fundamental distrust in the capacity and willingness of state agencies to establish the truth about crimes and to follow up with legally and socially legitimate punishments and thereby achieve a sense of justice. What Mexicans faced and continue to face is violence and impunity made possible by the informal and politicized mediation of the law. This is what constitutes the national infamy: “that the truth was no longer connected to justice” (p. 265, emphasis added).This book's original and major contribution is to examine different and, for many readers, perhaps unexpected historical modalities of nonstate attempts to overcome this infamy. Until their abolition in 1929, jurados populares provided a platform for popular learning and engagement with the crime, truth, and justice nexus. Until the 1960s, the increasingly popular nota roja (“the daily encyclopedia of criminal literacy”) performed this function (p. 64). In one of the book's most interesting chapters, the author demonstrates how the nota roja's public pursuit of the truth about crime contributed to the formation of the public sphere in general. A key finding of the book's first section is that in the absence of state judicial impartiality and transparency, nonstate public engagement with murder and truth finding also, and paradoxically, cosponsored the normalization of extrajudicial violence against perpetrators. Once public opinion reached a guilty verdict in murder cases, violent punishment—for example, in the form of ley fuga—was widely accepted, although it further strengthened the notion of the rule of law as a modernist illusion.Analytically refreshing, as a work of history this book is also remarkable because it always speaks to Mexico's current security and humanitarian crisis. Although Piccato discusses the relevance of key themes for the present, readers would have picked up this quality anyhow. This book is also about the shameful flaunting by Mexico's federal prosecutor of the “verdad histórica” about the fate of the 43 Ayotzinapa students. While every book of history endeavors to say something about the present, this one does an extraordinary job, above all because it lays out promising pathways of interpretation. Would it not be helpful to study certain popular religious practices, vigilantism, or even lucha libre as nonstate efforts to restore the crime, truth, and justice nexus? Doing research outside Mexico City will also further enhance our knowledge.In addition, this book is notable for the staggering amount of historical research that went into it: archives, newspapers, and an impressive amount of crime fiction. The last served to examine how fictional narratives engaged the disjuncture of truth and justice. Although this section about the emergence of the crime genre, its readership, and the fictional narratives of crime and justice themselves, in which the reader is introduced to peculiar detectives, can almost be read as a study in itself, the author manages to insert it into the overarching analysis of the historically specific criminal literacy of mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Finally, this book is outstanding for paying systematic attention to the gendered dimensions of the predominantly male domain of crime, law enforcement, violence, and truth.One issue, however, remains unclear to this reader: If the national infamy consists of the disconnection between truth and justice, and if, as Piccato states on the book's opening page, Mexicans “came to define reality by the absence of that connection” during the middle decades of the twentieth century, how should the period before be understood (p. 1)? Was the nexus still intact during the authoritarian and personalistic regime of Porfirio Díaz? As Porfirian regional political machines were showcases of cronyism in politics and business, the politicized mediation of the law, and thus impunity, this is not very likely. Is there a before and after for the disintegration of the nexus, and how can that be explained historically? The good thing is that these research questions spring from Piccato's original and possibly game-changing book. It will likely inspire a new promising research field for historians and scholars of current Mexico. This will only corroborate how remarkable this book is.