The crime that opens Cristina Rivera Garza’s “Death Takes Me” is one of unusual violence, viscerally described with a poet’s compression: “A collection of impossible angles. A skin, the skin. … Ear. Foot. Sex. An open red thing. A context. A boiling point. Something undone.” In an unnamed city, a man has been murdered and castrated, his body left in an alley. The body is discovered by a professor named Cristina Rivera Garza, who is versed in the distinctions between literal and symbolic castration, and who also reports the crime to the police.

As more castrated bodies are discovered and fear spreads, Cristina becomes both witness and suspect. She also emerges as an unlikely source for the investigation, helping to interpret the mysterious messages left at each crime scene: fragmented lines of poetry, carefully written in coral nail polish, or lipstick, or cut-out letters from magazines and newspapers. “Beware of me, my love,” one reads, a message of both seduction and menace. As the killer evades the grasp of both Cristina and the police, the missives become more pervasive, changing form, at once taunting and tormented, philosophical and unhinged.

“Death Takes Me” was first published nearly 20 years ago in its original Spanish. Now it arrives in the United States, seamlessly translated into English by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers. The victims are men, the murders explicitly and vividly physical. But in describing the attacks, language itself performs its own secondary mutilation. As Cristina says, “La víctima is always feminine. Do you see? … This word will castrate them over and over again.”

Always present in Rivera Garza’s body of work is an interest in close interpretation — often, the interpretation of texts, be they poems, journal entries, letters or newspaper articles. In her memoir “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” Rivera Garza herself guides the reader through the eponymous Liliana’s journals and via interviews with her friends, as she painstakingly pieces together a portrait of her murdered sister.

“Death Takes Me” riffs on these same ideas and motifs. We again have a Cristina Rivera Garza, working to interpret a text in the high-stakes arena of life and death — only this time she is a fictional narrator, and the story is a detective story instead of a somber personal reckoning.

But this detective novel radically scrambles what we think of, and how we relate to, the genre. The book features some of the standard fare of the mystery: There are bodies and clues, suspects and investigations, a pungent sense of fear and unease. And there are playful nods to familiar archetypes (the tabloid journalist is named “the Tabloid Journalist,” etc.). But the path toward apprehending the culprit runs not through a procedural hunt but via an unlikely act of literary criticism.

The missives the killer leaves at the scene of each crime are revealed to be lines lifted from the poetry of the great Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik. These clues are what initially compel the Detective to contact Cristina; she recognizes the case to be “full of psychological nooks and crannies. Of poetic shadows.

Gender traps. Metaphors. Metonyms.”

That also describes Rivera Garza’s exceptional style, and the deeply rewarding experience of reading “Death Takes Me.”The novel argues that reading isn’t just detective work or a form of interrogation; it’s deadly, in and of itself. Reader, writer, killer vividly collide. As the novel’s anonymous message writer says, “Those who analyze, murder. I’m sure you knew that, Professor. Those who read carefully, dismember. We all kill.”