Dead To Rites

The hacienda was a tourist paradise, with parrots, green plush lawns, a sky-blue pool, exotic flowers, and a corps of pretty brown girls to wait on guests. The Americans were all enjoying it, including Mrs. Wagstaff, a duchess of a woman with a dedication to serious sight-seeing, a sense of humor, and a concern for people some might call nosiness.

But outside the hacienda grounds lay the brooding mystery of the great ruins of Chichen Itza, relic of brilliant Mayan civilization and its ferocious rituals. Without warning, an ancient ritual revived. Widow Wagstaff, on her regular morning walk, finds the corpse of the youngest and most beautiful member of her group in the cenote, the sacred pool of the virgins. Mrs. Wagstaff, who has been solving detective story mysteries by the second chapter for years, has little faith, naturally, in the police and moves irresistibly toward the answer. Before she is done, she---and the reader---will have been led on a merry, murderous, illuminating chase.

It will take a paralyzed woman's eyes, a sweater on a chair, and a crumpled note to send Mrs. Wagstaff into the black silence of the Yucatan night to scramble up on the great Kulkulcan pyramid and there find the solution.