Review by Booklist Review
With world music standard on progressive radio stations, "world mystery" seems due for a U.S. breakthrough. Spanish-born Mexican Taibo, executive vice-president of the International Association of Crime Writers, is doing his part, with the remarkable private-eye novel An Easy Thing last year and now with this fascinating fictionalized version of the early 1920s effort by Mexican colonels and the same American oilmen who gave us Teapot Dome to "liberate" Mexico's oil-producing Gulf Coast. The novel centers, however, not on that failed conspiracy, but on four dominoes-playing friends who stumble across traces of the plot and its cover-up. These four characters--the romantic newspaper crime reporter, the detached attorney who rejects his own class to defend petty criminals, the poet who fought with Pancho Villa and writes patent-medicine jingles and poems-for-hire, and the Mexican-born Chinese anarchist labor organizer--are complicated men moving through a Mexico City awash in greed, corruption, and brutal violence. In brief chapters with the staccato click of a domino on a marble table, the narrative shifts from one protagonist to another, traveling around the dominoes table, around the city and its working-class suburbs, and deep into the heart of the puzzle. ~--Mary Carroll
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.'' (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 Tomás Wong, poet/advertising jingle-writer Fermín Valencia, and Alberto Verdugo, legal advisor to streetwalkers- -to ask, ``What's Margarita the Widow Roldán got to do with Colonel Gómez, Conchita, Celeste the hypnotist, Ramón 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 soufflé.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
