DEATH TRAIN TO BOSTON

Forget about the title. The train carrying Fremont Jones and Michael Kossoff eastward from San Francisco is dynamited before page one, leaving the two partners in love and work (the Agency, Discreet Inquiries) wounded, separated, and ignorant of each other’s fate. Michael, whose broken collarbone has hardly slowed him down, soon books passage again with Fremont’s Palo Alto friend Meiling Li. He’s bent on determining whether the explosion had anything to do with the harassing vandalism on the Southern Pacific line he and Fremont had originally been hired to investigate. And since Michael’s enemies have a trick of popping up again like Wile E. Coyote, it’s not long before he’s encountered two adversaries he thought were dead, both of them evidently hired to spy on him or kill him. Meanwhile, Fremont’s peril is greater: She’s been rescued by Melancthon Pratt, a Mormon who’s convinced that his five wives are all barren and that an angel has sent him to the spot where Fremont, flung clear of the train, lay with two broken legs. Can Fremont figure out which of the wives might help her escape while Michael struggles toward her, dogged by killers with every mile? Light on mystery, medium-light on romantic intrigue, heavy on cliffhanger endings, Fremont’s fifth (Emperor Norton’s Ghost, 1998, etc.) will best please audiences who really wonder about the answers to those questions.