I JUST GOT BACK FROM LAST WEEK'S TRIP TO MONTEVIDEO

            Last week I flew to and from Montevideo from my home in Northern California.  The trip takes about 25 hours with layovers for connecting flights, airport to airport; it’s a long way south and east to that part of South America.  According to American Airlines, it’s about 7,000 miles one-way.  My route took me from Sacramento to Dallas-Fort Worth to Miami to Montevideo and vice-versa.  Miami-Montevideo and the return trip are overnight flights where an hour or two of sleep makes all the difference in how you’ll feel when you get there. 

            The overall impression I got from my previous trips to Montevideo, a city of 2.5-3 million people, was that little had changed over the 31 years I’d been going back and forth.  This time it was different.  New construction of apartments and buildings for businesses was evident near the airport in the Carrasco neighborhood, all along The Ramblas bordering the Rio de la Plata as we drove into the heart of the city, and in Pocitos, the neighborhood Elaine and I lived in back in 1999.  Occasional new high-rise apartment buildings are going up in downtown inland from the river.  Several of the older buildings downtown are being remodeled and modernized.

A Preview of Coming Attractions, 1

The fourth volume in my South American mystery novel series, "The Matador Murders", is complete and ready to publish this summer, pending a few more rounds of editing, and formatting of the front matter.  For those of you who’ve visited this blog and might be interested, this is a preview of coming attractions.  There may be some minor changes between this and the final version.

In this installment of the series Roger and Suzanne are back in Montevideo after being summoned from Los Angeles by a late night phone call.  One of their friends is suspected of murder and needs their skills as detectives to help clear him of the charges.  Life for Roger, and especially for Suzanne, is more complicated these days as they now have an infant son, Robert.  The three of them, accompanied by Robert’s nanny, Bruce, fly to Uruguay and the game is afoot.  Before long we have our heroes directly in the middle of a gang war, off for a quick trip to Chile to learn all about the local crime scene, and meeting some unlikely allies in their mission.  The book has lots of action, a good whodunit storyline, guest appearances by several old friends and by an old enemy from previous books in the series, "The Ambivalent Corpse" and "The Surreal Killer", and occasional opportunities for sightseeing and eating regional specialty foods.  I hope you all have as much fun reading this novel as I had writing it.  A short excerpt from the current draft of the book follows:

 

                                             Chapter 1.  Adios to a crooked cop

Early that day, Jose Gonzalez, in his usual role as a detective on the Montevideo police force, had a loud and highly acrimonious argument with his partner.  Martin Gonzalez, the partner, was proud of two things.  The first was that he and Jose were not related despite the common surname.  The other was that he was the ranking half of the partnership and could say whatever was on his mind with no real fear of the consequences.  Martin was in fact a Detective Lieutenant and the officer with the second highest ranking in the detective division after his Captain, fortuitously not named Gonzalez.