The Shadow of the Shadow

*The Shadow of the Shadow* follows four men who meet to play dominos in a hotel bar in Mexico City in 1922. They are a motley group-a gun-toting poet who makes a living writing advertisements for patent medicine, a radical Chinese-Mexican union organizer, a lawyer who represents prostitutes, and a newspaper crime reporter who churns out pages of copy "like links of sausage in a *chorizo* factory."

Left to their own devices, the group would have waited out Carranza's presidency in their own quietly besotted fashion, ignoring the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution. But they witness a series of strangely related murders and begin to suspect a conspiracy involving the oil-rich lands of the Gulf Coast, greedy army officers, and American industrialists.

Critics have hailed *The Shadow of the Shadow* as the best of Paco Ignacio Taibo II's historical novels. Issues of oil, American imperialism, extortion, and government corruption give the novel a distinctly contemporary ring.