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Overview
The Shadow of the Shadow follows four men who meet to play dominos in a hotel bar in Mexico City in 1922. They are a motley group—a gun-toting poet who makes a living writing advertisements for patent medicine, a radical Chinese-Mexican union organizer, a lawyer who represents prostitutes, and a newspaper crime reporter who churns out pages of copy “like links of sausage in a chorizo factory.”
Left to their own devices, the group would have waited out Carranza’s presidency in their own quietly besotted fashion, ignoring the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution. But they witness a series of strangely related murders and begin to suspect a conspiracy involving the oil-rich lands of the Gulf Coast, greedy army officers, and American industrialists.
Critics have hailed The Shadow of the Shadow as the best of Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s historical novels. Issues of oil, American imperialism, extortion, and government corruption give the novel a distinctly contemporary ring.
Synopsis
Sex, murder, and gun-toting poets in post-Revolutionary Mexico City. Dominoes are played by all.
Publishers Weekly
Four friends in 1920s Mexico City champion the rights of the common man in this glorious literary thriller. Forthcoming simultaneously from Viking is Taibo's latest, Some Clouds . (July)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"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…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.' " —Publisher's Weekly
"Mexico's foremost crime novelist masterfully evokes a bygone era. His quirky characters are as endearing as they are well-drawn." —Library Journal
"Taibo is Mexico’s premier crime novelist, with history and politics always participating in the murder and mayhem...Taibo’s nimble and colorful prose and his picture of early twentieth-century Mexico City is beyond compare." —ForeWord Magazine
"A high-spirited historical fantasy...Every new revelation seems to give Taibo's madly spinning top another lash." — Kirkus Reviews
"The Shadow of the Shadow is ostensibly about imperialism (foreign oil interests might be behind all the murders) and nationalism (with a small "n") and the struggle to establish labor unions in an anarchic country. But Taibo never beats the reader with the message…Taibo has it both ways: He paints modest studies of humans as well as a mural of Mexican politics, history and the labor movement." —Columbus Dispatch