THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW

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 soufflÇ.