The Uncomfortable Dead

In alternating chapters, enigmatic Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II create an uproarious murder mystery with intersecting storylines. Those chapters written by the famously masked Marcos originate in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, where, amid a hallucinatory blend of different voices, we meet El'as, a Zapatista detective tasked with locating missing people. Taibo's chapters star his Coca-Cola-and-cigarette-consuming series detective H'ctor Belascoar'n Shayne: a PI specialising in cases stranger than reality. The two stories collide absurdly and dramatically in the sprawl of Mexico City. The ugly history of the city's political violence rears its head, and both detectives find themselves in an unlikely dance of death with forces at once criminal, historical, and political.