Paco Ignacio Taibo II

A triple mystery exploring Mexico: Taibo's shabby PI searches for Zapata still hiding in a cave, struggles against corrupt execs after an engineer gets offed and the union is taking over, and fights blackmailers who have sex pix of the normal suspects (govt officials) and movie stars. As you might have guessed, it's funny as hell.

I am so glad I picked up this book! This is actually the seventh book in the series, the fifth that's been translated into English, but there's a hugely informative essay at the beginning that fills the reader in on what went before. You need to know that Héctor has a body "impervious to wounds", that he was killed and resurrected.

When Héctor was a teenager, he had a sweetheart. Now she's a famous movie star, except that she's disappeared, and his daughter comes asking him to find her. show more This is about the literal frontera, the U.S.-Mexico border, but also the borders of reality and dreams, past and present and future, who we are and who we were and who we want to be. There are whores and narcotrafficantes, people who still have dreams and people whose dreams have died.

It's too bad that not all of Taibo's books have been translated, but you can bet I'll look for the rest that have been. show less

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 show more 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." show less

The futility of falling in with our "yesterdays, and they stay there forever, petrified, congealed, powerless to return." The one-eyed detective finally catches up with a Mexican actress on the run from drug-dealers and stalkers, a girl he has loved since the first glance of a inside of a stocking in school twenty years ago showing us how nothing ever stays the same and is never quite what you thought it was in the first place.