St. Martin's Press is proud to publish the first English translation of a major literary novel by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, whose previous appearances in this country have been this leading Mexican author's crime novels.

The "four hands" are those of two world-ranging journalists, one Mexican and one American. It is these two men who provide the initially improbable links between such disparate elements of Taibo's amazing novel as Stan Laurel's witnessing the assassination of Pancho Villa; the Disinformation Operation of an anonymous group in New York who approach their dingy office up a fire escape; the discovery of Leon Trotsky's notes for the crime novel he was writing when he was murdered in Mexico; the stupefying thesis proposals of graduate student Elena Jordan; an episode in the Contra war in Nicaragua; and the Spanish miner's takeover of a coal mine in the thirties.