Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's most versatile novelist, has looked the spy novel in the eye and produced a controversial world-class thriller. The Hydra Head reads as though it has been freshly minted out of the turmoil and subterranean intrigue of current world affairs….

[The] reader scarcely need suspend a single breath of willing disbelief. The CIA, the Israeli spy service, undercover Arab operatives and the ingenious but untested Mexican secret agents, sometimes in the person of the same (double or triple) operatives, clash violently in these intriguingly plotted pages….

Fuentes skillfully conducts the reader through these wonderfully intricate narrative maneuvers, flying us from an intensely rendered Mexico City to Houston …, to Galveston, Coatzacoalcos, and back again to Mexico City in the company of the confused but credible Maldonado and a cast of menacing but attractive villains. Fuentes, however, is more than just the Ian Fleming of underdevelopment. In addition...