EQMM, August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  **** Arthur Phillips: Angelica,Random House, $25.95. Written with a delicacy and elaboration appropriate to its Victorian period, this masterfully constructed puzzle-box novel may be ghost story, sexually charged psychological study, examination of gender differences and expectations, paranormal detective story, or some combination of the above. The same events in a troubled London household are seen from four viewpoints: a haunted and constrained young mother, her scientist husband, their precocious and mercurial four-year-old daughter, and a female spiritualist. As complex in theme as in structure, this is a novel of remarkable originality and literary adventurousness.

  *** Ed Gorman: Fools Rush In, Pegasus, $24. In June 1963, a black college student romantically involved with the daughter of a U.S. senator is one of two young men found murdered in Black River Falls, Iowa. In the course of lawyer and private eye Sam McCain's welcome return to action after a three-year absence, the lives of some series regulars take unexpected turns, though in at least one case the turn may be inevitable. Richness of characterization and nostalgic but unsentimental evocation of time and place make this whole series a unique and irresistible slice of dark-hued Americana.

  *** Vin Packer: Scott Free, Carroll & Graf, $24.95. For the first time in 38 years, Marijane Meaker (best-known as young adult writer M.E. Kerr) revives the byline under which she emerged as one of the best crime novelists of the 1950s. Scotti (formerly Scott) House, a pre-oper-ative transsexual who sometimes assists in her former wife's insurance investigations, is a likeable new sleuth worth meeting again. The plot, involving the household of a dying millionaire whose young daughter is threatened with kidnapping for an unusual ransom, will keep you turning the pages, but the picture of a transgendered life carries at least as much interest.

  *** Patrick Culhane: Black Hats, Morrow, $24.95. An aged Wyatt Earp, western legend turned Hollywood private eye, travels to 1920 New York to help Doc Holliday's speakeasy-proprietor son, one of the few purely fictional characters in the book. Culhane is the unconcealed pseudonym of Max Allan Collins, acknowledged expert at bringing historical personages to life, including this time Al Capone, William S. Hart, Bat Masterson, Arnold Rothstein, Damon Runyon, and Texas Guinan. The concluding bibliographic essay admirably separates fact from fiction.

  *** Lee Child: Bad Luck and Trouble, Delacorte, $26. Numerically obsessed adventurer Jack Reacher gets a uniquely coded distress call from an old Army MP colleague and reunites what's left of his special investigative unit in Southern California to avenge the dropping-from-helicopter murder of one of their number. This is by far the least impressive Child nov-el I've read, but I'll still recommend it to just about everybody for its combination of fair-play puzzle-spinning and thriller derring-do. Is an early example of Reacher's detective skill that comes perilously close to clairvoyance a subtle clue to the solution? Read it and see.

  ** Lee Goldberg: The Last Word, Signet, $6.99. In the eighth and final novel based on the Dick Van Dyke TV series Diagnosis: Murder, Dr. Mark Sloan looks into a case of murder by or-gan transplant that threatens members of his sleuthing team. A promising medical whodunit degenerates into over-the-top conspiracy thriller with soap opera seasoning. A spoiler warning alerts readers that endings of earlier novels in the series are given away. You might want to seek those out—given Goldberg's skill as writer and plotter, they're probably pretty good—and skip this one unless you're an obsessive fan of the TV show.

  (c)2007 by Jon L. Breen

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  EVIDENCE by Victoria Weisfeld

  Victoria Weisfeld makes her living as a health-policy writer. Over the past two years she's also turned her hand seriously to fiction-writing, though she has always enjoyed telling stories. Like her main character, she's an avid and observant traveler, but she says she won't ever give up mysteries for travel writing; she does enough fact-centered writing at work.

  From the first day of the Mediterranean tour, Eugenia Clarke was on a collision course with the clique of gabbling teenage girls. No doubt she embodied all those characteristics of the mothers, teachers, and maiden aunts they had fled across the Atlantic to escape. She wore sensible shoes and inconspicuous clothing, studied her tra-vel books and attended their guide's lectures, preferred museums and gardens to lying on the beach, and chose the local food, always carefully—in other words, she was anathema. A travel writer for several magazines and guidebooks, Eugenia had a well-developed repertoire of stratagems to maximize experience and minimize discomfort, which she willingly shared with her loyal readers, none of whom were under legal drinking age.

  "We picked you for this assignment, Eugenia,” Wally, her editor, had said, “because you're the one who can sort it all out."

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "The one who can tell our readers whether they really should be nervous going abroad in these times. Take the temperature. Test the limits. Go or no-go."

  "Should I assume you want the answer to be ‘go'?"

  "Not at all. If it's ‘no-go’ to southern Europe, it will be ‘go’ someplace else. Give it to them straight, like you always do. They're depending on you. As am I."

  Wally was a small man, with sharp eyes in an unwrinkled face, and when he leaned back in his well-worn brown leather chair, he looked like a boy visiting his father's office. She wondered whether his feet touched the floor. In the large window behind him were the peaks and valleys of midtown Manhattan. But the farthest Wally ever strayed from his fifty-square-block neighborhood was on his very infrequent trips to the Upper West Side to visit an ageing aunt. He traveled the world through the words of his authors, none of whom he trusted more completely than Eugenia Clarke.

  "You said the Mediterranean?” she prompted.

  "A standard tour. Not imaginative, but popular. Start in Greece, then west to Italy, Spain, Portugal. Some island-hopping. Use your judgment about excursions. What might average tourists do, and will it get them in hot water?"

  "'Taking the temperature’ will be a pleasure.” She smiled and accepted the thick packet and itinerary he handed her across his broad desk.

  In the two weeks before the trip began, she had her already short auburn hair trimmed, bought a few eminently packable clothes, and stocked up on alcohol wipes and novels she'd wanted to read. Every day she took long, brisk walks around her Arlington, Virginia, neighborhood to make sure her new shoes would be comfortable. Departure day soon arrived.

  The tour group had fewer women traveling alone than usual, and had attracted more comfortably middle-aged, seasoned travelers, with the exuberant exception of the teenage girls. As the trip proceeded, Eugenia observed that security in the various countries was more conspicuous, but not necessarily tighter. Still, it had its effects. She observed that compared to previous tours, fewer people strayed from the group or spent ostentatiously. Evenings, they tended to stay in the hotel unless the tour had a planned outing.

  By contrast, the girls did whatever, whenever, wherever. Their putative chaperone did nothing to dampen their high spirits or prevent their dashing away from the others, chattering while docents talked or tormenting the tour's series of impassive bus drivers.

  —"not without me, he wouldn't!"—a head toss—"I couldn't believe"—"there's nothing about him that"—"I'm not saying there was anything wrong or anything"—"my mom always"—"bright pink with a grey stripe like this"—a diagonal gesture across a T-shirted chest—

  Caught up in their own dramas, the girls rebuffed Eugenia's attempts to befriend them, and she reluctantly abandoned her efforts. Unfortunately, the harder she tried to avoid the girls, the more she encountered them. She literally stumbled into them at an archaeological dig covering a great many Greek acres; they selected, out of so many choices, the same café in St. Mark's Square; and yesterday, the tour having arrived in Spain, she rounded a carefully clipped hedge in the Alhambra once again right into their midst, so that they flew away like a scattering of bright pigeons. She couldn't help but smile after them, even though
they had knocked into her rather sharply and trod on her toes.

  —"no, I never"—"can you believe"—"not him, that guy over there"—the flock turned as one—"see her dress today?"—"and then my sister"—"you don't know what you're talking about. Again"—"sort of blue-green with silver sparkles"—

  When Eugenia learned that she and the girls were the only members of their tour group to sign up for a day excursion from Spain to Tangier, she was immediately apprehensive. For her it would be a tame adventure, one she planned to write about, but for them—carelessly beautiful, blondly American—what kind of trouble might they get into? There were the ever-present drugs and petty crime, there was the potential anti-Americanism, and the admittedly very remote possibility of some terroristic occurrence. The chaperone had announced she would not be going—what was she thinking?

  Eugenia's dreams that night were filled with kidnappings and extortion, and endless looping interrogations by uncomprehending foreign policemen. In the shower, she talked to herself firmly. If there were any problems, she reasoned, they would of course have a guide and, anyway, she was an infinitely more experienced traveler than the chaperone and likely to be a lot more help. In fact, who better?

  Promptly at 4:30 A.M., Eugenia was the first to take advantage of the meager breakfast the staff was setting out for the hotel's Morocco-bound guests. She wrapped an extra roll for later and walked outside to await yet another tour bus. In ones and twos, people from other tour groups slowly assembled under the portico. The girls did not appear.

  Eugenia sat on a bench by the front door and took out her guidebook. It diplomatically pointed out that many Moroccan women still wore the head-to-toe robes it called “Arab dress” and that visitors should respect these traditions of modesty in their own attire. This was a stricture Eugenia would have no trouble meeting at any time, but today she saw that the others waiting with her, regardless of nationality, adhered to it as well.

  Beyond the hotel portico, the night was still so thick and black that the bus's sudden arrival was a surprise, even though they all waited for it. Their Afritour representative, overweight and with enormous bags under his dark eyes, waddled quickly toward them. He waved a sheet of paper like an excessively starched handkerchief.

  "Está toda? All?” he asked.

  "Several more should be coming,” said Eugenia. She glanced over her shoulder at elevator doors closed tight as a bank vault. A slight anxiety grew inside her, as if it were she about to miss the bus. The guide took out a pair of smeared wire-rimmed glasses and began reading the list.

  When the dozen or so people present were accounted for, several people—several señoritas, in fact—were missing. He sighed deeply. Delay at the very first pickup point, with many more hotel stops ahead and sleepy people waiting in the dark.

  "You may proceed to the bus.” He waved vaguely in that direction. “I will call the room nombres. Everyone has the pasaporte?"

  Eugenia selected a seat that, when the sun came up, would be on the bus's shady side; her quilted cotton purse was her pillow. She closed her eyes. Like-minded, her fellow passengers quieted quickly.

  About twenty minutes later the girls surged aboard. “The front desk forgot to call us!” they announced to no one and everyone. Eugenia pretended to be asleep and soon drifted off in earnest.

  When she awoke at their rest stop, the bus was full of people who had been picked up from several hotels. The sun was beginning to burn through the hazy grey shawl that night left behind on its westward journey. The coffee saucers and sugar packets were lined up on the café's counter, ready for the half-size cups of strong coffee. Eugenia smiled appreciatively at the dark young man behind the counter, but his eyes were on the girls who just then stumbled in, sleepy, yawning, stretching like cats. Shorts, torn jeans, tank tops, tube tops, backless, braless, explosions of hair, sandals revealing pedicures inspired by a jewelry maker's workbench—amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire, gold, silver.

  On board the bus again, their guide introduced himself in English, French, and Italian—Michael, Michel, Miguel—and droned nonstop in a remarkable display of multilingual memorization until they reached the sea. One useful fact she did glean: They would take the hydrofoil from Tarifa at 10 A.M.

  Blindingly white in the morning sunshine, the Isla de Mallorca gracefully awaited the score of colorful buses that brought its passengers. On board, Eugenia headed to her favorite vantage point at the top deck's stern rail, where she could see both ahead and behind and feel the fresh sea-tasting breeze. She jotted in her notebook how Tarifa's bay was nearly encircled by land. The point on her right ended in a round tower and, on her left, a statue of a man, arms straight at his sides, stood sentinel for the traveler's safe return.

  As the hydrofoil began to churn, Eugenia leaned against the railing and gazed toward Africa's Rif Mountains, rough as split boulders. Over the engine noise she heard a Moroccan guide explain that Tangier was named for Tingis, an African nymph who bore Hercules a son. To protect his child, the guide said, Hercules cleaved a mountain in two, splitting Africa from Europe and opening the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The halves of this great rock are Gibraltar and Jebel Musa and have been known time out of mind, he said, as the Pillars of Hercules. For the ancients, they marked the end of the known world, which, Eugenia observed, was fast receding behind them.

  To her, the Moroccan mountains’ soft green foothills looked just like those of Spain, as if a ragged edge of that country remained attached when Hercules divided them. But any sense of familiarity prompted by the landscape evaporated immediately when the boat pulled into Tangier's harbor, and Eugenia saw awaiting them thirty or more local guides in striped djellabahs, ruby fezzes with black tassels, and, on their feet, yellow babouches with pointed toes and open backs. The green eyes that rarely missed anything were open wide. She inhaled down to her toes. Suddenly the sun was brighter, the heat deeper.

  The Moroccan guides smoked and talked animatedly in constantly reassorting clusters. Several slightly disheveled young men attached themselves to first one group then another, gleaning tidbits of information—scavenger fish waiting for some morsel to break loose from the main meal and drift profitably their way.

  Eugenia was one of the first of her tour group to arrive on the dock. In her long sand-colored skirt, her pale blouse and straw hat the soft shades of the sun-drenched Moroccan buildings, she moved through the dockside crowd without attracting a second look. She even stood right at Michael's elbow as he surveyed the passengers on the dock and asked, “And where's the lady with the hat?"

  Michael's group was now in the hands of “our local guide” Hassan. Hassan led them briskly through the long hydrofoil terminal, sparsely furnished with only a few rows of high-backed steel benches and, at this hour, empty of other passengers. Security was relaxed. Passports had been collected on board ship, with few formalities and no delays. The terminal's one uniformed guard took charge of Michael's battered participant list, gave Hassan a cursory nod, and waved them through. Yet another tour bus idled right outside.

  It bounced through the city's outskirts into the countryside, past high-walled summer homes of sultans and kings guarded by serious young men carrying serious automatic weapons. Right next to luxurious palm-shaded compounds, whose bright hibiscus and bougainvillea spilled over high walls, she saw run-down houses of grey, unpainted stucco with scrawny goats poking in the barren yards. Soon the bus made a prearranged stop for photos with a dusty camel. Hassan warned in the day's three languages—each hopelessly distorted by the bus's crackling public-address system—that at this stop the ever-present gypsies would try to sell them silver bracelets and spoons.

  "They will tell you they are real silver,” Hassan warned. “Don't believe them. They are fake.” Indeed, as the gypsies wound through the crowd of tourists, they murmured, “Reel silver.” “Silver spoon?” “Bracelet, cheap.” “Silver, lady."

  Although Eugenia was not about to mount the scruffy hissing beast, the girls, of course,
did.—"Why not?"—"not afraid"—"What do you say to a camel?"—"Whoa!"—"I'm slipping"—"not my idea"—"Help!!"—"I notice she isn't"—"Where's my camera?!"—

  Hassan moved the group efficiently through stops at several beautiful homes and small museums. They sipped mint tea in a restaurant overlooking the beach. Finally, they entered a short tunnel, an ancient gate to the medina. Hassan brought them to a stop, turned, and said, “Now, come with me to the Kasbah.” Hopelessly corny, but still Eugenia felt goose bumps on her arms.

  She soon discovered the narrow winding alleys of the Kasbah of her imagination, but also wider passageways and sunny open squares. A young gypsy boy appointed himself Hassan's assistant and stood alongside any uneven step or stone and, as they slipped by single file, mechanically repeated, “Watch your step,” for each member of the group and, “This way,” at each turning. Around the next corner there he was again, back at the head of the line, ready with another advisory.

  The boy had a grey cast to his skin, a permanent dusty film. Like the other gypsies Eugenia had observed that day, he had an unsettling gaze. Something either was not there or was closed to her. When he looked at her, he fixed on a point just at the edge of her eye, not on the point where they might learn each other's secrets, the aptly named pupil.

  They ate lunch in a high-ceilinged restaurant that buzzed with mosaics. Eugenia and the French couple she sat with enjoyed the tagines and Moroccan-style tapas immensely, but others in their group worried down only a few cautious bites. Later, at the officially sanctioned shops, only one or two tentatively bargained. Eugenia was tempted by some of the jewelry and tried on a poison ring with an ingeniously concealed latch, but in the end, purchased a bracelet whose negotiated price pleased both her and the seller.