Tequila: A Story of Success, Love & Violence by Tim Reuben; Westport, Connecticut: Meridian Editions; © 2025; ISBN 9781959-170273; 417 pages, $21.95. Publication date: Oct. 14, 2025
SAN DIEGO – This is a novel about three generations: the pioneers who build their tequila business from scratch; the second generation who expand the family’s company into a multinational, multi-corporate concern, and the third generation which consists of two brothers who loot the business and a sister who tries to save it.
Brothers Miguel and Tomaso spend money like water, passing up no luxuries and dreaming of amassing even greater fortunes. The co-protagonist along with attorney Brian Youngman is sister Maria, whom the Ramirez family sent to top-notch universities to acquire the know-how to run an international company. Brother Miguel was born vicious; even as a child he delighted in torturing animals. Tomaso is greedy but dull-witted.
Youngman, a handsome, single, Jewish attorney, unwittingly becomes enmeshed in the family’s affairs. He accepts Tomaso’s wife Nora as a divorce client and in so doing, jeopardizes the family’s RAM Enterprises by the threat of a search for the family assets.
It was a routine family law case, until Nora mysteriously disappeared and Brian suspected foul play. Initially considered an adversary by Maria, he and she became allies as rifts in the family became more apparent.
All this led to murders, most foul – as William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and Bob Dylan might say – as well as to drug cartels trying to muscle into the family business and a love affair prompted by being washed up on a desert island.
In short, Tequila is a page-turning saga by a practicing attorney turned first-time novelist.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.