The Shadow of the Shadow - Hardcover

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish

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.