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Synopsis
Mexico City independent detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne is summoned back home from vacation by his sister, whose childhood friend Anita has been raped and nearly killed by unknown assailants. Hector soon discovers that Anita, recently married into the wealthy Costa family, has just seen her husband and his two brothers systematically murdered. Now, Anita stands in line to receive a legacy of some 200 million pesos if she can stay alive long enough to receive it.
During his investigation, Hector trades stories with novelist Paco Ignacio (who bears no little resemblance to Taibo), who is writing a crime novel based upon the recent murder of fourteen narcotraficantes and has traced the crime directly back to Judicial Police Commander Saavedra.
Taibo weaves these two seemingly disparate threads together into a novel that stretches the boundaries of the crime genre and poses the question: how does a detective operate in a society in which the social and political institutions designed to protect the people are hopelessly corrupt?
Publishers Weekly
In a spare narrative voice that packs a wallop, Taibo ( The Shadow of the Shadow ) describes a Mexico City teeming with corruption, passion and hazards for his one-eyed, half-Irish, half-Basque, Coca-Cola-swilling PI, Hector Belascoaran Shayne. Taibo's detective owes a great deal to the Dashiell Hammett prototype: while he turns a jaded eye on the affairs of men (and women), he also demonstrates loyalty and courage beyond the call of duty in his work and personal relationships. Here he rescues his sister's childhood amiga Anita after she is brutally attacked and raped upon inheriting blood money from her murdered husband. Sound complicated? The threads of corruption in this novel are tied in double and triple knots, but clean prose carries the reader through a neat process of untying them, even if credibility is strained by Anita's readiness to become sexually involved with the hero before she has so much as removed the bandages from her injuries. In an interesting twist, characteristic of his playful literary sensibility, Taibo portrays Shayne's encounter with a writer of dubious success who bears the author's own given names, Paco Ignacio. Taibo takes the gumshoe into new regions of the map and of the imagination. (July)