During the summer of 1792, a man wearing the rough garb of a vaquero stepped out of the night shadows of Merida, Yucatan, and murdered the province's top royal official, don Lucas de Galvez. This book recounts the mystery of the Galvez murder and its resolution, an event that captured contemporaries' imaginations throughout the Hispanic world and caused consternation on the part of authorities in both Mexico and Madrid.

In this work Lentz further provides a readable introduction to the Bourbon Reforms as well as new insights on late colonial Yucatecan society through the vast depictions of the cross-section of Yucatecan people questioned during the decade it took to uncover the assassin's identity. These suspects and witnesses, from all walks of life, reveal the interconnected layers found in colonial Yucatecan society and the social networks of Merida's urban underclass as well as their unexpected ties to the creole elites and rural Mayas that have previously been unexplored.