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Combatting Terror:
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The Summer Pages: Books for the Beach
Deadly Deception by Susan P. Mucha
Hardback 288 pages. $24.95
Harbor House (Augusta, Ga.) 2005
Reviewed by Jan Merritt
“We have a man down at
Augusta National,” the officer in charge snapped into his phone. “White male
on path overlooking the 13th hole.” The Masters,
smuggled Peruvian artifacts, the cocaine trade, unsolved murders, and romance
… Deadly Deception is a good fit for anybody’s beach bag. Susan Mucha
launches her tale at the Augusta National Golf Club, then
deftly sends her readers chasing clues through the narrow, congested streets
of Lima and the graveled hairpin turns of the
mountainous countryside, settings with which she is obviously familiar.
Deadly Deception is a
first novel for Susan Mucha, but her full life up to this point provides the
details that make the story real in settings few of us have encountered
firsthand. The novel’s main characters are Elia
Christie, freelance journalist, and Dr. Luis Eschevarria,
an internist in private practice. Both have family ties to Peru. Our author herself was an emergency
room nurse and has visited Peru numerous times with her husband Edgardo, a doctor. In addition to her medical background
and her exposure to Peruvian life, Ms. Mucha has years of journalistic
experience in a variety of Catholic, medical, and regional publications. She
is the mother of four grown children, a resident of Augusta, Ga., and Kiawah Island.
Elia
Christie and Luis Eschevarria have never met until
the murder at Augusta National brings them together. A note on the dead man’s
body connects the murder to a deadly soccer stampede ten years earlier in Lima. Elia and
Luis depart together in haste for Peru. She is following a story; he is
trying to figure out the connection between a pathology case
he had ten years ago in Lima and the murder at the Masters
Tournament.
Susan Mucha’s
writing is at its best when the action takes off, and that does not take
long. She keeps Elia and Luis on the move,
sometimes in fast cars whose “blasting horns warned oncoming motorists that
drivers were racing through yellow lights,” sometimes on foot as they
scramble for their lives amid the bins of ancient bones in the pitch dark
catacombs beneath the “oldest church in the Western Hemisphere.” We meet Elia’s brother Raf, who is a
priest with a sense of humor. We meet the local cops and politicians, one of
whom takes Elia and Luis to his country estate in
“the dry, brown mountains. The road was one curve after another, reaching the
edge of a cliff, then turning back sharply before
the car could dive off into the Pacific hundreds of feet below.” Even as the
cast of characters grows, Ms. Mucha keeps us straight; we know the good guys
from the bad guys, don’t we? We glimpse Latin politics and power, intertwined
from the peasants up to the president with greed, drugs, and the looting of
priceless national treasures from archeological sites. We start to feel
comfortable among the “faded pastel-painted buildings set close to the road …
where the doors on most of the buildings opened directly onto the sidewalk.”
We find ourselves longing for the comfort of the kitchen in Elia’s grandparents’ home where Raf
sets “two pans of hot, gooey rolls … on the marble-topped table … with sweet
dough, baked with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon.”
Deadly Deception can
go to the beach with your teenaged daughter or stay at home with her
grandfather. Susan Muccha gives us a plausible tale
that moves quickly in a well-drawn, unusual setting and holds our interest without
graphic violence or sex. This is a book that won’t stay long in the beach
bag, or on the wicker table on the porch, or next to the bed in the
guestroom, and for those who agree, Ms. Mucha is at work on a sequel.
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