Frontera Dreams (1990) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
Good Reads meta-data is 120 pages, rated 3.65 b 274 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Mexico.
Verdict: Self-indulgent.
Tagline: World Weary.
Along its 3000 kilometres that frontier of dreams between the United States and Mexico is a land of magic realism where strange things may happen then as now. Tec is retained to find a Mexican soap opera actress, his high school squeeze, who has gone missing. Last seen in Baja (California). So Tec takes to the road to track her down and find why she ran away. The trail takes him back and forth across northern most Mexico in the hazy twilight of dreams.
Did I mention it? No? The detective is named Shayne like that wisecracking Irishman. Too exhausted by life, he does not crack wise. Along the border legends still live of Pancho Villa, the times of Juarez, Zapata, and the lost Mexican lands to the north. There is also the cruel reality of the narcotraficantes, then as now meeting American demand.
Did she flee from an ardent suitor? Was Harvey Weinstein involved? Or is it all a plot device to allow the author to pontificate on the state and fate of his country in that Northern shadow? You be the judge!
***
Known by his initials as PIT, there are ten novels in this Shayne sequence. Over the years I have read some others: An Easy Thing, Return to the Same City, and Shadow of a Shadow. Not sure if I have read all these titles, though they are in my data base, since I do not find them congenial in the elliptical style that seems lazy to me, the absence of a plot, and transparent characterisations. In fact, I am not sure I have read them since I have notes only for one. Strange.