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(More customer reviews)In this his third San Francisco mystery, The Miwok Eagles, Bay Area mystery writer Barry Smith takes David Moore off the foggy streets of "The City by the Bay" and puts him to work in the open spaces of Marin Country. His job:Find out who stole the Miwok Eagles, a set of rare nineteenth-century gold coins, and return them to their owner, socialite cattle rancher Bess Carman. There's lots to like about The Miwok Eagles: pace, originality, and action, but Smith is at his best when he casts the female characters. Of Bess Carman, he writes, her magnetism "wasn't arrogance; It was a projection of triumph over trivia." He describes the beautiful Jeanne Carman as seeming to be French, "Happiest in the middle of a male brawl." And, "She comprised the latent joy and the potential disappointment of a handsomely wrapped Christmas present." Kelly Raphael, an ex-girlfriend of David Moore who patches up his occupational cuts and bruises, possesses "a crackling cynicism" and "destructive wit." The main male characters: a former South African mercenary, an aging German counterfeiter, and a San Francisco rare-coin dealer, have their roles, but it's the women who leaven this sourdough loaf. The Miwok Eagles ends with the tantalizing hint that Smith's next mystery might have Kelly and David trying to track down legendary counterfeiter Fritz Boehmer in Ibiza.
Partick Hill, Byron, California
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The Miwok Eagles are a set of 1849 ten-dollar gold coins that become part of a bold con game mounted by an international counterfeiter named Fritz Boehmer. Miwok Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area accepted coins like these as payment for some of their land in the 19th Century. Boehmer plans to steal the coins from a San Francisco coin evaluator named Mirza Tarkanian, publicize their disappearance to drive up their value, and offer copies of them for sale.David Moore, co-owner of the Rothmore Security Agency, is trying to hold his swing shift of some fifty widely spread guard posts together when the theft of the Eagles takes place. The theft and resultant death of the coin dealer's nephew are partly his fault because he is late posting a guard to coin dealer Mirza Tarkanian, who frequently uses Moore's security agency when he is moving valuable coins from one place to another. The Miwok Eagles belong to Bess Carman, wealthy and influential owner of a ranch near San Francisco. Tracing the crime to her ranch, Moore begins to unravel the method of the criminals and reveal two murders tied to the crime. He has the help of a female archeologist who is studying Miwok village sites on the ranch. Her name is Kelly Raphael, and she too is disturbed by the activities of Bess Carman's visitors, especially when a servant goes missing. The search for evidence of murder takes Moore on a night hike to a site on the ranch where he finds buried in a dry stream bed, a crucible, a clean and carefully wrapped rifle, and the odor of a body which he has no time to exhume. Moore's efforts to uncover the plot lead him into deadly encounters when he becomes the target of one of the counterfeiters.
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