Death Comes to Santa Fe by Amanda Allen
Today I’m on tour with Rachel’s Random Resources with a
story featuring an amateur sleuth. Recently published on August 1st,
it is the 3rd book in the Santa
Fe Revival Mystery Book Series.
About the Book:
Former New York darling turned amateur sleuth Madeline
Vaughn-Alwin is once again thrown into a colourful yet deadly web of secrets,
lies and soirees to die for!
It's the week of Fiesta in Santa Fe and Maddie is looking
forward to enjoying the celebrations. But as 'Old Man Gloom' Zozobra goes up in
flames, so too do Maddie's hopes for a carefree life . . . Human remains are
found in the dying embers of Zozobra, and then Maddie and her dashing beau Dr
David Cole find a body washed up in the arroyo at the edge of town.
Soon identified as Ricardo Montoya, a wealthy businessman
and head of one of the most affluent families in Santa Fe . . . the plot starts
to thicken. While his beautiful wife Catalina and her complicated children seem
less than heartbroken at his untimely demise, and with many disgruntled locals
crawling out of the woodwork, Maddie is surrounded by suspects.
With the celebrations of Fiesta continuing around them,
Maddie and her 'Detection Posse' get busy infiltrating the best parties and
hobnobbing with old and new faces - but can they bring the murderer to justice
before they strike again?
Excerpt:
Prologue—Santa Fe,
September 1924
“Burn him! Burn him!”
The shout went up into the purple-black night sky, eager, full of
laughter, touched with just a bit of anxiety.
Madeline Vaughn-Alwin glanced around at the faces of her friends, barely
lit with the few torches planted around the garden, and shivered. Will Shuster, her artist friend, had outdone
himself with this project.
Everyone was still
shouting, dancing, when a burst of fireworks exploded over their heads, a
sparkling bouquet of red, green, blue, gold.
The light shimmered on Will’s giant puppet up on his dais, ghostly white
in his long paper skirt, except for a shock of bright green hair. His enormous eyes, painted black and ringed
in red, stared down at them wrathfully, his immense bat ears flapping in the
breeze.
They’d spent a week
building him out of wire, wood, wool and cotton, painting him, stuffing him
with everyone’s written woes.
Zozobra—gloom. Now they would
execute him, and destroy their problems to move free into the future.
As a bell tolled,
Maddie reached for David’s hand and held onto it tightly. He gave it a reassuring squeeze, making her
smile.
Zozobra’s long arms
fluttered upward, his red-painted slash of a mouth opening and closing,
emitting a rough growl. A group of
Maddie’s artist friends, who also fancied themselves musicians, started
pounding their drums and blasting their trumpets from the shadows. It was all very enthusiastic, but very out of
tune, and combined with Zozo’s growling it was deafening. Maddie laughed, and let go of David to clap
her hands over her ears.
“Burn him!” the cry
went up again. “Que la fiesta!”
She looked forward
to this week every year since she moved to Santa Fe, the time when the city
celebrated the moment three hundred years ago when Don Diego de Vargas marched
back into Santa Fe after being driven out twelve years before in the great
Pueblo Revolt. It was a few days of
pageantry, as the man given the honor of portraying Don Diego and the young
lady voted La Reina and her princessly court led the city’s old families in
special Masses at the cathedral, processions, dances. And, since Will and the others had come to
town, silly touches as well, like parades and masked balls.
And burning the
glooms of the year.
Maddie studied
Zozobra as he moaned and flailed, and wondered what the real Don Diego would
have thought about all this as he sat in his camp outside Santa Fe centuries
ago. As he prayed to La Conquistadora,
the wooden Holy Mary statue who fled Santa Fe with the Spanish and returned
with them, and now resided in a gilded chapel at the cathedral to be paraded
around every year in September. He had
prayed to her, it was said, to help him reenter the city without shedding
blood. If she let him do so, he told
her, he would throw her a party every year.
And so they did,
every autumn at Fiesta. But hundreds of
years of Masses and family parties were turning into ghostly burnings, dancing,
drinking.
Will climbed up onto
the dais, his rumpled red hair glowing in the torchlight, his paint-stained
hands waving much like Zozo’s. The light
reflected in his round spectacles. “My
friends! Thank you for be-ing here
tonight, and for all your hard work in gathering our glooms. Here’s to their destruction, and a bright new
year ahead of us! Que viva fiesta!”
The poet Witter
Bynner, Santa Fe’s master of ceremonies if there was one, paraded past in a
long black cloak, a torch held high, followed by a procession of red-clad
glooms moaning and singing.
Everyone cheered and
whistled as he tossed a flaming torch at Zozobra’s feet, and flames touched and
licked at the papier mache. It caught
and spread, crackling higher and higher, the smell of smoke curling around the
vast, tangled garden and into the night sky.
As his bulbous head burst into flame, his face melted, his eyes backlit
and demonic. Sparks flew up toward the
stars, and his arms flailed faster, caught helplessly in the glooms he had
created.
One big, cleansing
moment.
More flames shot up,
popping loudly. Maddie laughed, and
closed her eyes, holding tight to David.
She hadn’t many glooms, it was true; her painting was going better than
ever, her studio behind her Canyon Road house filling with work for a new
exhibition, her feelings for the handsome English doc-tor growing and
growing. Her little created family in
that house was happy, too, with Juanita’s twins at the Loretto school, Eddie
being promoted at his job at La Fonda hotel, Juanita baking up a delicious
storm every day, when she wasn’t writing to her handsome movie actor suitor in
Los Angeles. It had been a good year, a
happy one. Yet somehow the fire, the
moaning demon, created a touch of cold dis-quiet somewhere deep inside of
her. She wrapped her arms around David
and held him close.
“Dance with me!” she
cried as the music swung into a wild waltz.
He laughed, and twirled her around and around in the dying flames, the
expanding night, the stars that seemed to sparkle just within her reach as they
only did in New Mexico.
About the Author:
Amanda wrote her first romance at the age of sixteen--a vast
historical epic starring all her friends as the characters, written secretly
during algebra class (and her parents wondered why math was not her strongest
subject...)
She's never since used algebra, but her books have been
nominated for many awards, including the RITA Award, the Romantic Times
BOOKReviews Reviewers' Choice Award, the Booksellers Best, the National Readers
Choice Award, and the Holt Medallion.
She lives in Santa Fe with two rescue dogs, a wonderful husband, and a
very and far too many books and royal memorabilia collections.
When not writing or reading, she loves taking dance classes,
collecting cheesy travel souvenirs, and watching the Food Network--even though
she doesn't cook.
Keep in touch with Amanda on social
media:
Website: https://ammandamccabe.kmcb.site/index.htm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandamccabeauthor/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amandamccabebooks
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandamccabeauthor
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