Books like Leonardo's Bicycle

Actually, this was the second time that I read \ Leonardo's Bicycle\ . I had read theMartin Michael Roberts 1995 translation of Paco Ignacio Taibo's 1993 novel La bicicleta de Leonardo back in the 1990s along with some other detective/ crime fiction by this author. I was a big fan of his. However, of everything of Taibo's that I read back then I enjoyed his \ Leonardo's Bicycle\ the most. Lately, I've been reading a lot of crappy crime fiction. So, I decided to return to this old favorite.The novel is a collection of four intertwining stories that center on a Mexico City crime writer named José Daniel Fierro's fascination with Karen Turner who is a woman collegiate basketball player from the University of Texas at Austin. When the Lady Longhorn is assaulted and injured in Ciudad Juarez, Fierro travels to the border town to rescue her. The other stories are about an anarchist and his journalist friend in pre-Franco Barcelona, a former spook for the CIA who is looking to retire, and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Incredible as it might seem, all the stories come together to make a great novel. This noir crime fiction at its finest.Taibo is better known for his novels about the one-eyed Mexican detective Hector Belascoaran Shayne. Nevertheless, the quixotic, mystery-solving, crime-writing José Daniel Fierro is a great character, too. Like the Belascoaran series, this novel paints a very realistic portrait of Mexico in 1993 Mexico. I don't know, of course, but I can helped but think that Taibo's gritty and realistic crime novels influenced the writing of Roberto Bolaño and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.Even though Taibo is a first tier intellectual, historian, sociologist and political writer, I wish that he wrote more fiction. Happily there's at least one more Fierro novel (and-at least for me-some new Belascoaran novels) that I hope to read. I also plan to keep and reread \ Leonardo's Bicycle\ again. Enjoy.