Paco Ignacio Taibo II is one of the most popular and influential authors in Latin and South America. His endlessly inventive, highly-political detective novels, featuring the idiosyncratic private eye Hector Belascoaran Shayne, are set in the teeming landscape of Mexico City, a combustible mix of poverty, tragic class warfare, the anarchic and absurd. For Shayne it is a world that can bring tears one moment and blood the next.

An Easy Thing is the first novel in the Shayne series. Coping with his mother's death, his father's disturbing legacy and the loss of his lover, Shayne is faced with three difficult cases: violent threats against the daughter of a soap star, a murder at a strike-threatened factory and a quest to find an extraordinary missing person — Emiliano Zapata, hero of the failed Mexican Revolution.