Samedi's Knapsack

After a long stay in England, a love affair that fell apart, travel to Africa and the Caribbean, Mitch Roberts is headed home.Home to his ranch, his horses, and maybe -- or maybe not -- his detective profession. But if Roberts is looking forward to an uneventful life, he has farther to go than a return to southern Colorado. His problems start when a beautiful airline flight attendant suggests he meet her for a drink at her favorite bar when he stops over in Miami. The bar's parking lot, however, comes equipped with two thugs who knock Mitch out, take his passport, credit cards, and every cent in his pocket and drive off in the rental car. Desperate, Mitch finds the phone number of the only person he knows in Miami -- a former college acquaintance, Bobby Hilliard a rather sleazy character who has made a lot of money in questionable ways, and is now an art dealer.When Mitch finds the woman from the plane at the man's mansion; he is quick to realize he has been set up. But an offer of a sorely needed large fee tempts him, and he accepts a job. He is to go to Haiti, find an agent whom Hilliard had sent down with money to buy a large number of paintings and who has disappeared, and buy more paintings to replace those that are lost. Haiti is dismaying. The police and officials openly scoff at Mitch and his mission and more subtly let him know that he should stop nosing around.He is half-ill from the tropical heat and humidity and sickened by the poverty and fear that is everywhere.The atmosphere of Haiti's dark folklore pervades daily life -- the frightening Baron Samedi is a very real presence.Mitch is convinced that Hilliard's agent has been murdered and the art stolen, but he is driven to go on, as much to earn his fee as for a feeling deep inside that the quest has some meaning for him.With a Haitian guide, a poor, educated, desperately loyal man, Mitch travels the country tracking down the artists of the missing paintings in remote towns and buying more of their art.Dold's books are inevitably highly praised; he is an extraordinarily fine writer whether his subject is a mediocre lawyer accused of murder (The Devil to Pay) or a female Chinese-American police detective outwitting the leaders of a drug ring (Schedule Two).His sense of place is so vivid and so strong the reader is with him, in the Congo, in Jamaica, at Christmastime in London.Samedi's Knapsack, imbued not only with criminal machinations of more than one kind, but with the beliefs of the Haitian people in evil spirits and the living dead is another strong and colorful thriller to burnish his fine reputation as a writer. AUTHORBIO: Gaylord Dold was born in Kansas and raised in rural southern California in the good old days.He has lived in California, Florida, Kansas, and London, England, where he attended the London School of Economics.Over the years he has published twelve crime novels, many of them highly acclaimed. He has traveled widely in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa.These days he's back on the prairie of southern Kansas, where he lives with his wife, Megumi, and their dog, Aki.He is working on a new novel.