Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Queen of the South

I started reading Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Queen of the South, a novel about a Mexican woman who had been a narcotrafficker's girlfriend in Mexico and then escaped to Spain (Melilla, specifically, on the northern tip of Africa) when he was killed. I really like Pérez-Reverte, who has a beautiful style and originality, but this book bored the living daylights out of me. I decided to stop if I got to page 100 and it hadn't changed. And it didn't. I found it to be a pedestrian and uninteresting drug story, of which there are a million to choose from. The main character Teresa is flat and boring, and there is no plot to make up for that fact. Major disappointment from a fine author.