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Leisure Books:  New York City
1981 (PB)

Nearly twenty years ago, I reviewed a number of archaeology adventures penned by Malcolm Shuman, a professional archaeologist who had earned his doctorate at Tulane University in New Orleans.  It was something of a surprise when I found that Shuman had written an archaeology thriller some twenty years earlier under the pen name, M.S. Karl.  It was even more surprising that this earlier effort was even better than his later “Alan Graham Mysteries.”

It is the mid-1970s and Mayab introduces the reader to archaeologist Clay Holliman, who is returning to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula after a ten-year absence—not to excavate, as he explains to the customs official at the Merida airport, but to evaluate the excavation at Bacab Tun, a Mayan site, directed by the late John Catlett Davies.  He will set up this undertaking at the hacienda of the elderly physician, Dr.  Alejandro Leon, who, as a result of his lifelong interest in Mexican pre-history, moved him to offer his home to Davies as a headquarters away from the field.  Not incidentally, Clay—then a doctoral candidate-- had been part of Davies’ crew ten years earlier, excavating at another Yucatan site.  That experience had not ended well:  Davies treated his graduate students, including Clay, with cruel disdain and, in fact, drove several of them out of the discipline entirely.  Clay left the project after a contentious dispute with Davies, but unlike most of his colleagues, he completed his report obligations to Davies, completed his doctoral studies, and secured a college teaching position in Oregon.  But the experience in the Yucatan continued to haunt him; not only had Davies questioned Clay’s professional competence, but soon after Clay’s leave-taking of Mexico, Davies had married Dr. Leon’s daughter, Josefina, with whom Clay had fallen madly in love.  With all of that emotional baggage, Clay reluctantly accepts an offer from the Central American Institute, which had funded Davies’ most recent research at Bacab Tun in the state of Quintana Roo, to wrap up the final report on the dig.  Ostensibly the offer is made because Clay, of all the assistants employed by Davies over the years, was the only one to actually turn in a final report.  But upon arriving in the Yucatan, Clay learns from Josefina that she had prevailed upon the Institute to hire him to complete her husband’s work. 

Josefina implores Clay to complete her late husband’s work, despite the agonizing drama ten years earlier.  She shows him a heretofore undiscovered copy of the Book of Chilam Balam, a document that was to the ancient Maya what the Gospels were to Christians.  Most had been burned by the fanatical Bishop Diego de Landa in the 16^th century, but this volume would seem to be the oldest and purest extant copy.  It tells of the abandonment of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and the subsequent migration of the Maya to the Peten in modern-day Guatemala.  During the journey a major figure in the exodus named Nacxit died or was killed; he was also known as Kulkulkan, the Feathered Serpent god of the Maya, or Quetzalcoatl by the Aztecs.  Davies believed he was buried at Bacab Tun and that its discovery would be the Mesoamerican archaeology find of the century.  Josefina also believes Davies was killed because he was so close to making this momentous discovery—most likely at the behest of Gonzalo Omar, the most influential antiquities dealer in the Yucatan, and one not known for scrupulous behavior.  She implores him to seek answers to her husband’s untimely death.

What follows is a complex and intricate mystery set in the context of the late 20^th Century Yucatan.  The culture and people of this very distinct region of Mexico is lovingly and accurately portrayed—without either romanticizing them or denigrating them.  It is a tale told by a writer who obviously loves this part of the world and the people who inhabit it.  Four enthusiastic trowels for Mayab!