Summer of the Dragon
The setting of this novel is fascinating: the desert of the American Southwest, with all of the mystery surrounding the Anasazi and other ancient peoples. D.J. Abbott, a self-deprecating, overeating graduate student, is spending the summer working for Hank Hunnicutt, an eccentric multimillionaire who dabbles in many pursuits, including Southwestern history and archaeology. Hank surrounds himself with a variety of personalities including many pseudoscientists. It is this group of characters that D.J. derisively describes in the first half of the novel. The second half gets more interesting with a kidnapping and an attempt at solving the crime, with the action moving out into the desert. Reader Grace Conlin captures the sardonic tone of the narrator. The author does not interweave the archaeological background of the area into the story as much as she does in her works set in Egypt (e.g., Crocodile on the Sandbank, Audio Reviews, LJ 6/1/91), but her fans will enjoy this work.?Catherine Swenson, Norwich Univ., Northfield, VTCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.