Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new book begins in November 1990 in Bogota, Columbia, when a group of gunmen ambush a car, kill the chauffeur and kidnap its two women passengers. The gunmen were working for Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellin course cocaine cartel, who in the early nineties kidnapped the relatives of a number of Colombia politcians in order to pressurise the government to suspend the policy of extraditing drug traffickers to the USA. Chronicle of a Kidnapping is at once a powerful, disturbing account of how Esobar undermined all Colombia's civil instutions by murder or bribery, and a moving exploration of the fate of Esobar's hostages, who were mostly middle-aged or elderly women.