Assignment: Tripoli
by L. L. Zimmerman
Category: Travel

Master of the Estate is a riveting and suspenseful imbroglio of intrigues, characters, and literary traditions, all evolving around the search for possession of an ancient Egyptian scarab and a treasure believed to be buried somewhere on the Sanchez estate. This gothic mansion outside New Orleans, Louisiana, is surrounded by a swamp haunted by treasure-hunters who seek to cancel each other out and a mysterious creature from out of space and time. The protagonist of the story, predestined to host the ancient amulet, is a former heroin addict whom we first see in Atlanta in an abandoned house that he calls his. The joy of his first addiction-free day is shattered by shootings of rival cutthroats that rattle his dwelling. The text enacts a historical archaeology that takes the reader from the post-Civil Rights era in America to ancient Egyptian civilization. This brilliantly told story also stages a palimpsest of literary paradigms including magical realism, postmodernism, the detective story (in which Worthy would be the action hero), and the picaresque novel, to cite only a few. Furthermore, the narrator deftly cites the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Francis Bacon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and many others.