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A New York Times Editors' Choice bookThe haunting story of a daughter's struggle to confront her father's turbulent-and often violent-legacyAfter a fourteen-year estrangement, Maria Venegas returns to Mexico from the United States to visit her father, who is living in the old hacienda where both he and she were born. While spending the following summers and holidays together, herding cattle and fixing barbed-wire fences, he begins sharing stories with her, tales of a dramatic life filled with both intense love and brutal violence-from the final conversations he had with his own father, to his extradition from the United States for murder, to his mother's pride after he shot a man for the first time at the age of twelve. Written in spare, gripping prose, Bulletproof Vest is Venegas's reckoning with her father's difficult legacy.