Return to the Same City

The last Hector Belascoaran Shayne mystery from Paco Ignacio Taibo II ended with the one-eyed detective lying in the oily rain of Mexico City, his body perforated with bullets. Now the author of this hugely popular, highly political, endlessly inventive series of novels proves that no miracle is beyond his reach. Hector Belascoaran Shayne rises from the dead.
He's a gun-carrying argonaut of Mexico City, city of strikes and pollution, "cemetery of dreams." He doesn't want to be alive, but he is, and when a woman tells him a sob story about her sister's death at the hands of a handsome rumba dancer in white patent leather shoes named Luke Estrella, Hector agrees to do something about him.
In a Mexico City hotel the detective meets a battered, alcoholic gringo who's after the same man. On Acapulco Bay, nearly blinded by bikinied beauties, the detective shadows Estrella, who once owned porn shops in Cuba, cut off the hands of Che Guevara, and is now meeting with CIA operatives and a trafficker of stolen archeological treasures. Before Hector can decide whether he is pursuing Estrella or Estrella is pursuing him, he finds himself on a flight to Tijuana, for a confrontation with a killer.

It's tough enough returning from the dead--and Taibo's prefatory note blithely disclaims any knowledge of how H‚ctor Belascoar n Shayne survived the hail of bullets that apparently killed him at the unhappy end of No Happy Ending (1993)--without having to go back to punching a time clock, and Belascoar n is in no hurry to take the case foisted on him by a would-be client named Alicia. But Alicia is inventive and persistent, and at length Belascoar n agrees to shadow Luke Estrella, the Cuban who drove his wife, Alicia's sister Elena, to cocaine and early death. Joining forces with a gringo reporter, Belascoar n soon realizes that killing Elena is the least of Estrella's crimes, and certainly the most mundane of his adventures. Under various aliases, Estrella has cut the hands off the dead Che Guevara, fixed prices in the international cocaine trade, trafficked in arms for the Nicaraguan contras, hobnobbed with pornography publishers and archeological looters, and--together with a transnational corporate attorney and a loose-cannon CIA op-- served as a judge for the Se¤orita Bikini Acapulco '88 competition. The story of how Belascoar n brings this cartoon monster of evil down with the help of an avenging mariachi band is an engaging pendant to his H‚ctorless epic Leonardo's Bicycle (1995). Fans of Mexico City's greatest one-eyed detective will be overjoyed to find him not only alive and dyspeptic as ever but deeply smitten with his client: ``How he loved her. She was the ideal woman for a suicide pact.'' -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Taibo's novels about Mexico City detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne (No Happy Ending) are an addicting import. At first, their hard-boiled surrealistic flights?as if Garcia Marquez had been taking writing lessons from Dashiell Hammett?can strike a reader as excessive and glib, but soon they become part of a beguiling worldview in which everything, including crime and love, are elements in a cosmic joke. So you find here that Hector, left a bullet-riddled corpse in the rain in No Happy Ending, has been miraculously resurrected for another case. It involves a shadowy figure with several names, who seems to have caused the suicide of someone's sister and is being pursued by an alcoholic American reporter with sources in the CIA. Is the many-aliased Luke Estrella also involved in a guns-for-drugs Contra operation? Hector doesn't really care, but sets off in dogged pursuit anyway, to Acapulco, then Tijuana, finally bringing matters to a head in a hilarious climax involving several hired mariachi bands, armed to the teeth, in an empty warehouse. Don't forget the two ducks that live under Hector's bed, and how down he gets when he runs out of Coke. As noted, these tales are an easily acquired taste.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.