Nancy Fairbanks, Holy Guacamole!

Holy Guacamole!

Nancy Fairbanks

Berkley, Nov 2004. $5.99, 276 pp.

ISBN: 0425199223

After traveling through several American states and quite a few foreign nations solving homicides along the way, Caroline finds a murder investigation in her own backyard in El Paso. They are attending the opera, seeing a contemporary version of a Macbeth dealing in modern day illegal drug trafficking. Mary is appalled at the changes artistic director Vladislav Gubenko made to the Bard's classic.

After eating tostados with guacamole, Vladislav leaves for home ignoring his irate critics. The next day his next door neighbor and former vice cop Luz finds Vladislav dead. The police think he choked to death in his vomit, but Luz believes otherwise; she feels a killer used a pillow to smother him. Luz and Carolyn try to learn who the killer is and why murder. They kidnap a Juarez-based drug dealer and take him to the States for the bounty, rescue students from white slavery, and get men abusing their authority by illegally jailing women for personal use. However, the Gubenko killer remains at the top of the list.

Many Americans and Mexicans see El Paso as a border town, but to Carolyn it is a cosmopolitan center with many of the good points that large cities contain with the additional influence of the borderland culture. Luz and Carolyn make a great crime-fighting team who hopefully will continue to clean the streets from those felonious varmints. Nancy Fairbanks has written a serio-comic who-done-it in which Carolyn's trivial, historical sputtering adds humor to the witty and exciting pursuit of a killer.

Harriet Klausner