Héctor Belascoarán Shayne leaves his job and marriage to become an independent detective in 1970s Mexico City. The Netflix series page gives that premise and divides the adaptation into three long episodes based on named books by Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The first, Días de combate, sends Belascoarán into a television contest and into an investigation of a strangler with a mysterious woman. A desk and a new professional identity are not enough; he must enter the city’s public circuits to find a case and people willing to help him pursue it.
The television contest is a particularly odd opening for a detective. A private investigator usually claims authority by noticing what others miss; a contest asks him to become visible to strangers. That tension makes the screen adaptation’s first case more than a generic mystery. Belascoarán has abandoned a predictable career, but the city does not automatically recognize the role he has chosen. The contest gives him exposure while the murder investigation demands another kind of credibility. Being seen and being trusted are not the same achievement.
The second episode, Cosa fácil, pairs the kidnapping of a television star’s daughter with the murder of a union leader. Those cases belong to different public worlds: celebrity culture and organized labor. The official guide places them in a single installment, so the detective cannot treat Mexico City as one undifferentiated backdrop. Who attracts attention, whose disappearance produces pressure and whose death is taken seriously may vary with social position. The series need not announce a complete theory of the city to make that contrast useful. Its episode construction puts the cases next to each other and requires Belascoarán to pursue both.
The third episode, No habrá final feliz, raises the stakes of his independence: when the detective becomes inconvenient to the police, a corpse is planted in his office to implicate him in a killing. Netflix credits each of the three installments to a named Taibo II book. Across those premises, Belascoarán’s new job moves from public self-introduction to competing cases and then to direct pressure from the police. The city is no longer just where he finds clients. Its institutions can decide that a detective who asks the wrong questions should become a suspect.
Belascoarán’s chosen independence thus has a price that changes with each case. Television can make him visible, but it cannot protect him from the police. A celebrity family can summon attention, while a murdered union leader asks him to pursue a different kind of public concern. The three-book structure gives Mexico City more agency than a painted backdrop: it supplies the detective’s work and can threaten his claim to do it. His profession begins with self-invention; its test comes from the people and institutions he confronts.