MEXICO WAY

Moss, who sometimes teams with Arnaud de Borchgrave (Monimbo, 1983) and sometimes doesn't (Death Beam, 1981), cooks up a Tex-Mex thriller about secession and oil rights and dirty politics on both sides of the Rio Grande in which the hero is, of all things, a decent CIA officer. Texan Jim Kreeger is the Agency's man in Mexico City who answers a call for help from his daughter and thereby inserts himself into an American-backed plot that would carve Mexico's northern states into a new and independent country. The conspirators are the ultraconservative ranchers of northern Mexico and their bankers, the Texas oilmen who would be granted the rights to drill off the shoreline of the new country. The plotters also have the unwritten support of the good ol' President and those of his administration who see in the secession a solution to some of the pesky drug and immigration problems. Straight-arrow Kreeger knows nothing of the plot. As far as he can tell at first, he's just dealing with the usual back-stabbing and double-dealing of the druglords and the permanently entrenched, election-stealing, revolutionary ruling party who cut his boyhood friend, Texas's rough Judge Renwick, to pieces. But the reappearance of defrocked spook Art Kroger, Kreeger's nemesis from Asian days, suggests that the rash of Mexican murders has political connections, and once on the scent, Kreeger cannot be shaken off. Original, horrifying, extremely entertaining, and certainly no stranger than any of the bungled real-life geopolitics of the past 20 years.