The Shadow of the Shadow

A crime reporter, a lawyer, a failed poet, and a Chinese Mexican union organizer accidentally discover a plot to divide the oil-producing Gulf Coast from the rest of Mexico

This glorious novel reads as if James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett had collaborated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a version of The Three Musketeers set in 1920s, postrevolutionary Mexico City. Taibo's ( An Easy Thing ) four memorable protagonists champion the rights of the common man against corrupt military and police officials, Chinese tongs, a secret anarchist cadre and assorted criminals in this romp through turbulent and romantic times. Caught unwittingly in an intrigue spawned between Mexican army officials and U.S. oil barons, these four not-so-young friends--a war veteran/poet, a disreputable lawyer, a Chinese Mexican union organizer and a crusading crime reporter--walk through a landscape of dead bodies and mysterious women to prove that the power of the press and true commitment to ideals can beat all odds. Insights into each character and delightful surprises on nearly every page of this literate historical thriller support one of the characters' contention that crime writing is "where you find the real literature of life."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Halfway through prolific Mexican writer Taibo's dense, bloody, high-spirited historical fantasy of revolution, political corruption, and murder in 1922 Mexico, crime reporter Pioquinto Manterola interrupts a dominoes game with his unlikely fellow-heroes--Chinese- Mexican labor organizer Tom s Wong, poet/advertising jingle-writer Ferm¡n Valencia, and Alberto Verdugo, legal advisor to streetwalkers- -to ask, ``What's Margarita the Widow Rold n got to do with Colonel G¢mez, Conchita, Celeste the hypnotist, Ram¢n the Spic and long- distance ejaculator, the lieutenant whose name we don't know, and the French aristocrat about whom we know even less?''--and that's only the first of his 15 riddles. The trail of corpses, grotesques, and anarchists eventually leads through innumerable adventures, gunfights, flashbacks, and dominoes games to a 1920 plot to cede control of the Gulf provinces to gringo oil barons--but every new revelation seems to give Taibo's madly spinning top another lash: you'll end as dizzy as when the mystery seemed deepest. Except for the violence and politics, nothing like Taibo's previously translated noir outing, An Easy Thing: this one's for readers who like their conspiracies light as a souffl‚. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Taibo, Mexico's foremost crime novelist, leaves the contemporary scene of An Easy Thing (Viking, 1990) for the Mexico City of 1922. The promise of the revolution has been betrayed, and four friends who play dominoes nightly find themselves involved in a series of murders that are strangely related. As the bodies pile up, a sinister conspiracy emerges, involving the oil rich lands of the Gulf Coast, and greedy army officers and American industrialists. While Taibo masterfully evokes a bygone era, the theme of oil has a distinctly modern ring. His quirky characters, from the Chinese-Mexican anarchist to the poet who writes jingles for patent medicine ads, are as endearing as they are well drawn. This novel is essential for public libraries.
- Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Cty . Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.