Fiction
Alchemy Fire Murder: a Mary Wandwalker Mystery
Former Archivist Mary Wandwalker hates bringing bad news. Nevertheless, she confirms to her alma mater that their prized medieval alchemy scroll, is, in fact, a seventeenth century copy. She learns that the original vanished to colonial Connecticut with alchemist, Robert Le More. Later the genuine scroll surfaces in Los Angeles. Given that the authentic artifact is needed for her Oxford college to survive, retrieving it is essential.
Mary agrees to get the real scroll back as part of a commission for her three-person Enquiry Agency. However, tragedy strikes in Los Angeles. Before Mary can legally obtain the scroll, a young man is murdered, and the treasure stolen.
Murder and theft are complicated by the disappearance in the UK of a witch mysteriously connected to the scroll. While Mary's colleague, Caroline, risks her sanity to go undercover in a dodgy mental hospital, her lover, Anna resorts to desperate measures. These, and Anna's silence over blackmail, threaten the survival of the Agency. Mary teams up with the victim's brother to track the killer, and the real alchemy scroll. Solving crimes on two continents will involve a rogue pharmaceutical corporation, Janet the witch, the Holywell Retreat Center near Oxford, plus the trafficked women they support, a graduate school in California, and a life-threatening mountain-consuming wildfire. Can these inexperienced detectives triumph over corrupt professors and racist attempts to rewrite history? Can they remake their fragile family? Will the extraordinary story of Robert Le More prove a source of hope for today?
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Oxford 1399, January, Prima Materia or
Mother Julian's Gift
CHAPTER 1: A Present Day Summons
CHAPTER 2: St Julian's College has a problem
CHAPTER 3: Who Stole the Alchemy Scroll?
CHAPTER 4: What has Been Split Must Be Reunited 3
CHAPTER 5: A Mixing of Bitter Substances
CHAPTER 6: Holywell's Vulnerable Clients
CHAPTER 7: Mary Takes Charge
CHAPTER 8: Like Treats Like
CHAPTER 9: Two Brits in Snowbound Los Angeles
CHAPTER 10: Strange Mixing
CHAPTER 11: Anna and Leni
CHAPTER 12: Into Darkness
CHAPTER 13: An Awful Lot of Blood
CHAPTER 14: They Call Him Cookie Mac
CHAPTER 15: Who's Looking for the Invisible College?
CHAPTER 16: Brother of the Victim
CHAPTER 17: Pursuit of the Scroll and the Murderer
CHAPTER 18: Stew
CHAPTER 19: Janet Holds the Key
CHAPTER 20: Janet's Story
CHAPTER 21: An Arsonist at The Old Hospital
CHAPTER 22: The Fire Between Them
CHAPTER 23: A Good meal Around the Fire
THE ALCHEMY FIRE MURDER
CHAPTER 24: Miss Wandwalker on the Trail
CHAPTER 25: The European History Foundation
CHAPTER 26: Mary and Sam
CHAPTER 27: Flying Apart
CHAPTER 28: Betrayal
CHAPTER 29: Anna with the Scroll
CHAPTER 30: Over Water, Back to Earth
CHAPTER 31: Reunion at Holywell
CHAPTER 32: Pizza After the Storm
CHAPTER 33: A Phone call to St. Julian's
CHAPTER 34: Trouble at St. Julian's
CHAPTER 35: St. Julian's in Turmoil
CHAPTER 36: Reading and Gardening
CHAPTER 37: Letters Across the Atlantic
CHAPTER 38: In the Doldrums
CHAPTER 39: Roberta Africanus
CHAPTER 40: Mercurius
CHAPTER 41: Coagulation
CHAPTER 42: Mer-Corp
CHAPTER 43: President of the Alchemy School
CHAPTER 44: Roberta Le More's Scroll
CHAPTER 45: Land of the Fire
CHAPTER 46: Confronting Demons
CHAPTER 47: Fire in the Valley
CHAPTER 48: Your host, Jez Wiseman
CHAPTER 49: Last Act in Oxford
CHAPTER 50: A Question of Trust
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Sacred Well Murders
A simple job turns deadly when Mary Wandwalker, novice detective, is hired to chaperone a young American, Rhiannon, to the Oxford University Summer School on the ancient Celts. Worried by a rhetoric of blood sacrifice, Mary and her operatives, Caroline, and Anna, attend a sacrifice at a sacred well. They discover that those who fail to individuate their gods become possessed by them.
For the so-called Reborn Celts, who run the summer school, have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Could their immersion in myth be less a symbol for psychic wholeness and more a clue of their intent to engage in terrorist violence? Who better to penetrate their secret rites than an apparently harmless woman of a certain age?
Mary agrees to spy on the Reborn Celts, then learns, to her horror, of Anna's passionate affair with the chief suspect, Joe Griffith. With Griffith also the object of Rhiannon's obsession, Mary realizes too late that that these 21st century Celts mean murder.
The Reborn Celts draw Mary and her friends into three rites to summon their gods: at an Oxford sacred well, by the Thames on the way to London, and in Celtic London, where bloodshed will restore one of the Thames' 'lost rivers.'
Before the fatal night of the summer solstice, Caroline and Anna race to London seeking Mary, who has been kidnapped. Will she end as the crone sacrifice? Or will the three women re-make their detecting family, so re-constituting a pattern of archetypal feminine compassion?
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IN THE CARDS: A GLOBAL EPIC OF THE HEART
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Sleuth and the Goddess: Hestia, Artemis, Athena, And Aphrodite in Women's Detective Fiction
260 pp.
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