THE RETURN OF THE SPANISH LADY.

Davis, Val (pseudonym of Robert Irvine and Angie Irvine)

ISBN 10: 0312262248 / ISBN 13: 9780312262242

Published by St Martin's Minotaur, 2001

About this Item

First printing. The fourth novel written by the Irvines under this pseudonym and the fourth in the series featuring archeologist Nicolette Scott, whose interest in early planes (and her father's influence) has gotten a position at the Smithsonian. A search for a downed Japanese fighter plain in a wilderness reserve in Alaska is funded by the head of a major pharmaceutical company - whose real interest is in the bodies of some 1919 gold seekers who died of the Spanish flu. SIGNED on the title page. 307 pp. Fine in a fine dust jacket (as new.). Seller Inventory # 76149

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE RETURN OF THE SPANISH LADY.

Publisher: St Martin's Minotaur

Publication Date: 2001

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: FINE

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Archaeologist and expert on old planes Nicolette Scott tries to stop a pharmaceutical company from reviving the 1919 "Spanish Lady" flu epidemic that had killed millions around the world so it can make billions on the antidote.

Review:

Nicolette Scott is an archaeologist with an unusual expertise: she tracks down old airplanes, a specialty that's landed her a new job at the Smithsonian and made her just the right person to take part in a privately financed expedition to unearth a rare Japanese plane shot down in Alaska during World War II. That the financing comes from a pharmaceutical company doesn't seem particularly strange to Scott--her only concern is whether she got the job due to the influence of her father, an archaeologist who's not interested in any ruins less than a thousand years old. In Nicolette's fourth adventure (after Track of the Scorpion, Wake of the Hornet,and Flight of the Serpent), the first part of the expedition goes smoothly, despite warnings from a shaman-like Alaskan park guide that the spirits of the dead don't want the pristine wilderness of the Hammersmith Bear Sanctuary disturbed. And neither, it turns out, do the bears themselves, whose attack on Scott and her party reveals the real agenda of the benefactors who've funded the "dig." They want the remains of gold prospectors who died near the site of the plane crash of a now-extinct strain of influenza, the Spanish Lady of the title. It's an implausible setup, which might have worked in the hands of a writer more skilled at explication of her characters. But the Alaskan landscaped is nicely realized, and the flashbacks to New York at the outset of the flu epidemic of 1917, which killed millions of people, manage to add some flesh to an otherwise thin story. --Jane Adams