Sunday, June 1, 2008

THE KING'S GOLD

An Old World Novel of Adventure

By Yxta Maya Murray

Harper. 406 pp. Paperback, $14.95

The King's Gold is the second outing for Yxta Maya Murray's feisty Lola Sanchez, a California bookshop owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of South American history and a weakness for swashbuckling adventure. The first book, The Queen Jade, was a madcap tale of mad colonels and Guatemalan jungles; this time, the locations are no less exotic, and the plot hardly less fantastical. The book opens as a mysterious stranger pays a visit to Sanchez's Red Lion bookshop with a couple of monosyllabic goons and a letter apparently written by a Medici prince containing a series of cryptic clues that will, the letter claims, lead the successful solver to a stash of Montezuma's plundered gold. Matters are complicated by the knowledge that the prince in question was no ordinary evil conquistador. According to legend, Antonio Medici was not only a would-be alchemist but also the victim of an Aztec curse that transformed him into a werewolf. Though Lola is due to be married in two weeks, she is, of course, unable to resist the lure of such a challenge. Two hours later she's on a plane to Florence, and the stage is set for a romp of a treasure hunt through the finest churches (and gloomiest catacombs) of Renaissance Italy.

The King's Gold is an exuberant confection of exploits, as thrilling as they are far-fetched, a page-turner of serpentine plot twists and tongue-in-cheek wit. Lola Sanchez is a female Indiana Jones, a thoroughly 21st-century heroine who combines boldness and brilliance with a wry awareness of the cliches of the adventure genre and a nice, self-deprecating humor. "As the Fiat continued to skid down the Roman roads," she muses at one point, "a familiar but still very disturbing idea that perhaps I am not normal flitted through my mind." Fortunately for Sanchez, she's not the only unusual person on this quest. Soon she's joined by her bearish professor of a fiancé, who declares the hunt "an archaeologist's dream! Except for the depressing death part."

The result is an irresistible blend of crime caper, 16th-century legend and the traumas of wedding planning set against the backdrop of Italy's most famous antiquities. But, while the plot moves at a cracking pace, it's the sparkling interplay between these larger-than-life characters that lends the novel such verve and originality.

-- Clare Clark is the author of "The Nature of Monsters," recently released in paperback.