'The Interior Circuit', by Francisco Goldman

A book about driving in Mexico City? That seemed like something I could relate to. My first brush with the Interior Circuit - the urban highway that gives novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman's "Mexico City chronicle" its title - came after a petrifying wrong turn on my bike. His memory of a euphoric rush down one of the city's huge avenues brought to mind a similar ride two decades ago, and his account of "bafflingly" missing a turn and being sucked into a mysterious multi-lane road eerily recalled my own first time behind a wheel here.

But if The Interior Circuit sounds like the kind of book in which an author sets himself a wacky challenge - in this case, learning to negotiate Mexico City's nightmarish traffic - and turns it into an entertaining slice-of-life travelogue, it most definitely is not.

Goldman's journey is an intensely personal quest: his driving project is triggered by the looming fifth anniversary of his young wife's tragic death, after a bodysurfing accident, and his belief that the key to coping with his grief lies, not in fleeing the Distrito Federal or "DF" (as her city and his beloved on-and-off home for 20 years is known) but in "going further in".

Indeed, the story of his driving adventures, entertaining though they are, is over almost as fast as it began. It is just one part of a frank account that begins with Goldman navigating personal devastation and morphs into his wider attempt to understand Mexico's brutal turbulence under its new president, Enrique Pena Nieto.

One case in particular, the kidnap and murder of 13 people from the Heavens disco in broad daylight in Mexico City in May 2013, obsesses Goldman, and his chronicle abruptly shifts gear as he throws himself full-throttle into probing what he sees as a litany of shortcomings and contradictions by city and federal authorities in the case, and pondering what really happened and why.

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Goldman makes little attempt to be objective about a president whose approval ratings have sunk to the lowest for a Mexican head of state in 20 years. Indeed, he makes clear his views and disgust: Pena Nieto may look "like a Ken doll" but he "publicly defended murder and rape as legitimate uses of force" and "flaunted his authoritarian character" in a pre-election speech defending police intervention to evict demonstrators near the town of Atenco in the State of Mexico in 2006, when he was state governor. That gave rise to the #Yosoy132 protest movement.

The telegenic president's reform agenda won him plaudits internationally but his credibility has unravelled spectacularly since September 2014, when another disappearance and, most likely, murder, sparked huge demonstrations: that of 43 students from a teacher training college in Ayotzinapa. Snowballing corruption scandals have since compounded the public loss of faith in the government, and Goldman catches up on the unfolding events - the capture of drug boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in February 2014, and the investigations into the fate of the missing 43 - in a postscript that brings the book up to date.

Beautiful writing and unblinking honesty largely make up for the feeling that what starts out as a diary of an emotional journey reads, near the end, rather as though Goldman is emptying his notebook with a deadline looming. But little has yet been written about the Pena Nieto presidency and Goldman is thought-provoking on the corrupt path he sees Mexico stuck on, and the uncertain course that lies ahead.

"I don't pretend to know what is going to happen in Mexico," Goldman writes. "Undoubtedly, though, Ayotzinapa has provoked resounding expression of the frustration, anger and desperate yearnings for change of millions of Mexicans."

The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, by Francisco Goldman, Grove Press, RRP£16.99/$26, 368 pages

Jude Webber is the FT's Mexico correspondent

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