Life Itself

The first English language edition of the work that received the Latin American Hammett Award for Crime Fiction features author Jose+a7 Daniel Fierro, who finds himself in the unlikely position of police chief when his two predecessors are murdered.

In Taibo's irresistible noir-meets-magic realism approach, wit and politics are central to the narrative. Jose Daniel Fierro seems an unlikely candidate for police chief in the Mexican border town of Santa Ana. A crime writer who has never fired a gun, he's also something of a coward. On the other hand, he's a quick study, a mine of crime fiction and movie lore-and he's alive, which is than can be said for the two previous chiefs of his town, a communist outpost that boasts a colorful revolutionary and counterrevolutionary past. After Jose deals with his first few crimes, the story picks up steam when the stabbed and naked corpse of an American woman is discovered in the church. In her nearby motel room, Jose finds a bloody yellow dress and the picture of a young child. Looking for the killer sends him into the big leagues, at which point the narrative detours begin to make sense. Taibo (No Happy Ending) may scant suspense here, but he delivers on all other fronts, peppering his prose with dark laughs that illuminate the human condition.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Taibo's waggish novels about Mexico City shamus Hector Belascoar n Shayne (No Happy Ending, 1993, etc.) often gave the impression of wanting to be the last detective stories ever written. That impression's even stronger in this novel-about-a- novel that sends mystery writer Jos‚ Daniel Fierro, who squeezes orange juice by hand and urinates sitting down, to the northern town of Santa Ana as its new police chief. Against a backdrop of laughably epidemic ruling-party corruption and anti-union warfare, JD and his colorful underlings (an assistant who only answers to ``Blind Man,'' officers who once worked as activists or sold insurance) battle the federal judicial police (who as always are intent on a cover-up) to identify a killer: Someone followed American photographer Anne Goldin from her tryst with Santa Ana's mayor and left her nude, stabbed body in front of the altar at the Church of Carmen. It's only the first of several murders, each of which implicates the victim neatly in the preceding murder. But the case itself, as JD muses in his interspersed letters to his wife back home and in his ``Notes for the History of the Radical City Government of Santa Ana,'' is anything but neat. JD ``discovers nothing, only that things simply happen,'' as in life itself. JD is on target on his own novel's shortcomings: ``It lacks a hook, dramatic architecture, the negative characters...are badly drawn.'' But this end-of-the-road fantasy, so full of Taibo's melancholy cartoon gaiety, will be a feast for connoisseurs. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mexican author Taibo's sixth novel to be translated into English (following Four Hands, LJ 6/1/94) is not the average run-of-the-mill mystery or police thriller. By means of straight narrative, epistolary, and pseudo-chronicle techniques, Taibo introduces protagonist Fierro, a famous mystery writer-whose resemblance to Taibo is more than coincidental-called to Santa Ana as the town's newest police chief. His arrival is soon followed by a series of murders and even an attempt on his own life. After a lengthy exposition that takes up the first two-thirds of the novel, the denouement appears to be sudden and, in retrospect, rather arbitrary. Despite the bare-bones plot and disappointing climax, the quirky supporting characters and amusing self-parody make this work appealing. For most public libraries.
Lawrence Olszewki, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.