AGATES ARE FOREVER

Nick Cameron, a “consulting geologist,” is having dinner in a “desiccated dump in the flat Sonoran Desert” in Arizona when in walks Theo, a dame “hotter than a Soviet drill bit at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole.” She’s got “emerald eyes,” “marathoner thighs,” “stratovolcano breasts,” a stash of valuable agates of mysterious origin, and a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver. “This dame knows what she’s doing,” Nick says to the reader, who is cast in the role of confidant; it’s a tricky literary device that, for the most part, the author pulls off. Soon, Nick is embroiled in a mystery involving the agates’ provenance, crooked marketing consultants, plundered museum funds, a beautiful industrial spy, a treasure-trove of Mexican gold ore with historic connections to Pancho Villa, and a “homicidal hobo” intent on making Nick his next victim. Terret successfully weaves the disparate threads of the complicated plot together, layering the narrative with fascinating, well-informed geological references and leavening the proceedings with humor, evoking the lingo and brash attitudes of old detective pulp fiction novels throughout. Women are “dames” (and mostly set dressing), their legs are “gams,” guns are “roscoes,”, and murder victims are “whacked.” The author conveys real feeling with Nick’s origin story: At age 13, he discovered his grandfather’s stash of 1950s detective novels, and the two bonded over their mutual enjoyment of the genre, using the books’ tough-guy lingo whenever they got together until the older man’s death. Terret falters, though, when Nick’s enigmatic friend Frankie, a Navajo-Italian jewelry designer who calls the shots in the multi-pronged investigation, briefly takes over the narrative from Nick to explain his actions—this sudden switch breaks Nick’s conversational connection with the reader and undercuts Frankie’s mystique with unnecessary exposition. The text includes Nick’s clue lists and a few line drawings of code symbols, floor plans, and landscapes to clarify plot points and add visual interest.