No Happy Ending

A private eye who shares his office with a plumber, an upholsterer, and a sewer engineer, Hector Belascoaran Shayne is a one-eyed anarchist, a man who knows intimately the teeming landscape of modern-day Mexico City - land of pressing poverty, absurdist street theatre, and tragic class warfare. For Shayne, it is a world that can draw tears one moment and blood the next - as it does on the hot afternoon when he finds the dead Roman in his office.
A threatening letter and a Polaroid snapshot of another corpse let Hector know that he has been targeted for intimidation. Tracing the identities of the two dead men, he finds out what they had in common: a connection to a dead daredevil named Zorak, whose sinister sideline was training a now-disbanded paramilitary group used to put down political demonstrations.
Like Hammett's classic Red Harvest, No Happy Ending is riddled with violent death. Like the works of Marquez, it dances on the bitter edge of reality. Literary and invective, No Happy Ending is the greatest work of an author taking crime fiction into extraordinary new ground.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II was for many years professor of history at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City.