Status
Available
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Collection
Publication
HarperCollins
Description
An unexpected gift has arrived for Carol Farley this Christmas: an envelope bearing a newspaper clipping and no return address. There, blurred but unmistakable, is a photo of a man missing for years and feared dead--Carol's father. It is a siren calling her to a world she has never known, to a place of ancient majesty and blood-chilling terror. Now, surrounded by towering pyramids on Mexico City's Walk of the Dead, a frightened yet resolute young woman searches for a perilous truth and for the beloved parent she thought was gone forever. But there are dark secrets lurking in the shadows of antiquity, a conspiracy she never imagined, and enemies who are determined that Carol Farley will not leave Mexico alive.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Linkmeister
This was a departure from Peters' other non-series books in that it's not at all a light-hearted romp. It's dated (written in 1971) both in language and in subject (drug smuggling has regrettably progressed far beyond the quantities she describes here), but it's still topical.
It's a good read, but
It's a good read, but
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don't expect humor on the order of The Camelot Caper or The Dead Sea Cipher. Show Less
LibraryThing member tjsjohanna
I really enjoyed re-reading this novel. It does have a dated feeling, but there are some good twists and when I got to the end I wanted to go back and read passages in light of the info I now had. Some nice stuff about Mexican pyramids - echos of amelia peabody!
LibraryThing member Bjace
When Carol and her boyfriend Danny decide to go to Mexico City to track down her absent father, they become involved in a plot to smuggle drugs into the US. This is a muddled book, written in the early 1970s and is a kind of odd mix of Mexican antiquities and drug traffic. Pleasant but a little
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hard to follow. Show Less
LibraryThing member Condorena
This was a very interesting story and it evoked my memories of the sixties and seventies.
LibraryThing member page.fault
Book summary in one sentence: Hey, kids, don't do drugs.
Longer summary: college student Carol loads up her mysterious past and deadbeat druggie boyfriend and goes down to Mexico to find her long-lost father. She meets up with him and quickly becomes perplexed and afraid of the mysterious behaviour
I found this to be a preaching, proselytizing, depressing, boring, and above all simplistic book. And Elizabeth Peters wrote it. Appalled? I was. In fact, I'm still incredulous. This can't have been written by Peters. It just has to have been written by some malefactor who stole her name. To make it even worse, I listened to this on audio by a reader who spoke in monotone in a voice entirely devoid of emotion or inflection and who kept pronouncing the Spanish in the worst of American accents (for example, Jaime became "HIE-MEE"). She also has a very irregular reading pace and puts pauses in bizarre places; for example, here's how one sentence got read, where '.' is used to indicate pauses between words: "Ivan... was... wearing his favorite.... black shirt............ and slacks". Yes, it is difficult to listen to.
What surprised me was the strength and strident tone of Peters' anti-drug message. I can't imagine that this sort of book can come from mere creativity; I suspect she suffered a personal tragedy related to drugs. I don't understand books like this. Non drug users certainly don't need to be convinced or scared. As for drug users, if people are willing to happily ignore the actual disturbing facts about drug use, I can't imagine that a bit of fiction will suddenly sway them. All this does is cover standard ground: marijuana is a gateway drug. LSD is really bad. Drug addiction can slowly erode peoples' humanity. Drug traffickers are bad people.
Overall, I'm disappointed and totally thrown by this. If you're looking to try Peters for the first time, please, please, do not read this. And if you had the misfortune to have already committed this error, don't take this as representative of Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels-- she is a much, much better author than this. She is, in fact, the creator of one of the most fantastic first-person narrators I have read (The Amelia Peabody series; first book is Crocodile on the Sandbank) and her other works are uniformly hilarious, articulate, entertaining, and intelligent. And unless you are a hardcore fan (and possibly even if you are), I suggest leaving all 400 rabbits alone.
Longer summary: college student Carol loads up her mysterious past and deadbeat druggie boyfriend and goes down to Mexico to find her long-lost father. She meets up with him and quickly becomes perplexed and afraid of the mysterious behaviour
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of the people around her. Throughout, Carol fights constantly to pull her boyfriend away from the diabolical lure of drugs; the conclusion is obvious from the first dire foreshadowing sidenote. Evil portents and dark omens abound; actual mystery and suspense are entirely absent. The main character is weak and the rest of the cast is uniformly unpleasant and uninteresting.I found this to be a preaching, proselytizing, depressing, boring, and above all simplistic book. And Elizabeth Peters wrote it. Appalled? I was. In fact, I'm still incredulous. This can't have been written by Peters. It just has to have been written by some malefactor who stole her name. To make it even worse, I listened to this on audio by a reader who spoke in monotone in a voice entirely devoid of emotion or inflection and who kept pronouncing the Spanish in the worst of American accents (for example, Jaime became "HIE-MEE"). She also has a very irregular reading pace and puts pauses in bizarre places; for example, here's how one sentence got read, where '.' is used to indicate pauses between words: "Ivan... was... wearing his favorite.... black shirt............ and slacks". Yes, it is difficult to listen to.
What surprised me was the strength and strident tone of Peters' anti-drug message. I can't imagine that this sort of book can come from mere creativity; I suspect she suffered a personal tragedy related to drugs. I don't understand books like this. Non drug users certainly don't need to be convinced or scared. As for drug users, if people are willing to happily ignore the actual disturbing facts about drug use, I can't imagine that a bit of fiction will suddenly sway them. All this does is cover standard ground: marijuana is a gateway drug. LSD is really bad. Drug addiction can slowly erode peoples' humanity. Drug traffickers are bad people.
Overall, I'm disappointed and totally thrown by this. If you're looking to try Peters for the first time, please, please, do not read this. And if you had the misfortune to have already committed this error, don't take this as representative of Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels-- she is a much, much better author than this. She is, in fact, the creator of one of the most fantastic first-person narrators I have read (The Amelia Peabody series; first book is Crocodile on the Sandbank) and her other works are uniformly hilarious, articulate, entertaining, and intelligent. And unless you are a hardcore fan (and possibly even if you are), I suggest leaving all 400 rabbits alone.
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LibraryThing member RApril48
Interesting, memorable. Very different from Amelia Peabody but well written
LibraryThing member thornton37814
Carol, on a break between semesters from an unnamed midwestern university, uses some of an inheritance she and her mother received to visit Mexico. Her drug-addicted boyfriend Danny accompanies her. She intends to visit her estranged father George after receiving anonymous notes about him. Her
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father lives with a Mexican family. Ivan invites Carol to join one of his tours of Teotihuacan, and she falls in love with the site. Following an incident, she moves out of the hotel and into the house with her father. Danny experiments with more dangerous drugs. Carol soon realizes something related to drug-trafficking is afoot, but she isn't sure whom she can trust. This book first appeared in 1971. The story fits that time and place and probably received an enthusiastic reception by readers. Today's reader will recognize the "preachiness" against using narcotics and respond less favorably. The audio version by Grace Conlin is not recommended. She reads more as a narrator than as someone trying act the parts with enthusiasm, fear, and the other range of emotions characters should be feeling. The voice did not fit Carol. This book differs significantly from other works I read by the author. Show Less
LibraryThing member Carol420
Possible Trigger Lots of Drug Abuse
I have read this author for more year than I care to think about. I own and have read everything she had written as Barbara Michaels. Most of these are chillingly wonderful, haunted house/ghost stories. Sadly. something very bad must have been going on in her life
I have read this author for more year than I care to think about. I own and have read everything she had written as Barbara Michaels. Most of these are chillingly wonderful, haunted house/ghost stories. Sadly. something very bad must have been going on in her life
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at the time she sat down to pen this. I borrowed this one from the library....and my friend that works there told me that she wasn't going to tell me much about the book ...but that it was "different". That was the understatement of the entire century. Quite frankly, it was probably the worst thing I have ever read by ANYONE. It was like a continuous furious rant at life. The very last thing I ever expected of an Elizabeth Peters book is for it to make me depressed and anxious. Reading about a heroin drug smuggling operation south of the border, LSD trips, the effects of drug abuse, and even sadism isn't in any way the norm from this author. It's not that I can't or won't read about those things, but when I do, it's because I intentionally chose to do so. Think about how you would feel if you bought what was supposed to be an inspirational romance in a Christian bookstore and discovered that you were reading hard-core porn instead. This book was written in 1971 and Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels passed away in 1977 so maybe things were already going bad in her world. If you are an "old" fan, you can probably read this with sympathy for whatever caused this wonderful writer to pen this "toxic garbage". If you are a new reader...please read her earlier books, like [Ammie, Come Home], my absolute favorite, and [Stitches in Time] both that she wrote as Barbara Michaels, or her Amelia Peabody series that was written as Elizabet Peters...but please know that this one is as off her norm as the sun is from the Earth. Show Less
Original publication date
1971
DDC/MDS
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