Death of an Evangelista - Hardcover

Martin, Allana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312198531 ISBN 13: 9780312198534

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1999

Synopsis

Detained as a murder suspect after discovering a corpse in a taxi, Texana Jones must prove she is innocent of the crime, which she suspects is related to the shadowy secrets of a respected local family.

About this title

About the Author

Allana Martin lives with her husband in Lipan, in her native Texas. Her first novel, Death of a Healing Woman, won the Western Writers of America Medicine Pipe Bearer Award.

Reviews

Although an evangelist is indeed murdered in this atmospheric but unfocused third adventure (after Death of a Saint Maker) of trading post-owner Texana Jones, her death seems almost an afterthought. During a south-of-the-border trip for cheap dental work, Texana gets into a taxi already occupied by a dead man with a knife in his chest. She talks her way out of Mexican custody ("One does not, in Mexico, voluntarily become a witness to any crime"), but neighbor Claudia Reyes resents Texana for going free while her cousin, the cab driver, remains in jail. The murder victim, readers learn much later, was a German with mysterious family ties to the West Texas site of a WWII prisoner-of-war camp. Meanwhile, Texana's pickup truck is stolen, several horses are poisoned at the ranch of a local power broker, a suspicious trade in religious icons is revealed, and someone runs Texana off the road and robs her, and that evangelist is brutally slain (though her death is connected only loosely to the other events in the novel). Martin displays a rich knowledge of the Texas-Mexico frontier, a hard but enchanting landscape with a complex mix of politics, ethnicity and religion. However, the bloated plotting leaves entire story lines untended for long stretches, while Martin turns to unsatisfying, tacked-on monologues to bundle up the many loose ends.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As if there weren't already enough crime in tiny Polvo, Texas, trading-post owner Texana Jones, returning from root-canal work across the Mexico border, comes upon a dead body in a waiting cab. A whisper of her powerful acquaintance Gordon Suarez (Death of a Saint Maker, 1998) springs her from the pokey in plenty of time to find that her pickup, parked on the American side of the border, has been stolen (after its miraculous return, it'll be run off the road, as Texana says, by the Holy Ghost). Still around the corner are the defacing of Texana's store, a rash of poisoned horses, and the murder of nondenominational evangelist Electra Reaves. Not that Electra's exactly an innocent lamb: her house is full of artifacts looted from Presidio County churches, and the religious medal she gives Texana seems to have a dark history of its ownperhaps tied to the powerful dynasty of ranching patriarch Federico Haro, or perhaps reaching back centuries to a martyred goat herder celebrated in old Federico's reminiscences. With so many crimes and misdemeanors to account for (and more on the way), it's a safe bet that the answers will be as tangled as the questions. Lovers of regionalism will still welcome this third dispatch from Martin's colorful borderland, as will those with a taste for injustices by the bushel; others may think twice before knocking. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312198531
• ISBN 13: 9780312198534
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260