Review Rating
With the October 2004 review, we began rating the books on the basis of one to four trowels;
one trowel= don’t bother, to four trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Golden Oldies - reviewing previously unreviewed books by previously reviewed “greatest hits” authors!
As we approach nearly twenty-five years of the MVAC reviews of archaeological fiction, I thought it would be fun to re-visit six of the authors whose works have been reviewed in the past. Three of these authors have sadly passed away since I first reviewed them (Margot Arnold, Lynn Hamilton, and Elizabeth Peters); two have “retired” their archaeologist protagonists, Gideon Oliver (Aaron Elkins), and Emma Fielding (Dana Cameron); and one, (Kate Ellis) continues to put DI Wesley Peterson and his friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, in harm’s way as solve contemporary crimes that have their roots in the distant past. While these authors have been reviewed previously, these books have not.
Curses! by Aaron Elkins
Reviewed on: June 1, 2025
The Mysterious Press: New York
1989 (HC)
Physical anthropologist Gideon Oliver (aka the “Skelton Detective”) was suffering from a bout of the blues between academic semesters—the incessant rain of the coastal State of Washington, work on a boring research paper, and the realization that he was older than the dean of faculty—when he was rescued by a call from his old mentor, the distinguished anthropologist Abe Goldstein. As a board member of the Horizon Foundation for Anthropological Research, Abe had agreed to act as director for the re-opening of a ceremonial center called Tlaloc—a Mayan site with a Toltec overlay-- discovered ten years earlier in the Yucatan Peninsula, some sixty miles from the state capital, Merida.
A scandal had spurred the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH) to shut down the excavation, but the organization was now willing to re-consider that decision if Abe, because of his unblemished reputation, would oversee the excavation. Gideon had worked on the original project a decade earlier and the discovery of skeletal remains recently discovered in the excavated building called the Priest’s House prompted Abe to call on Gideon for his expertise. Gideon explained to his wife Julie, who was also invited to join the re-opened project, that the original dig, like many such expeditions throughout world, had included both professional archaeologists and amateur laypersons who often paid substantial sums of money to become short-term “shovel bums” on projects. The scandal had erupted when the dig director, a dissipated and lackluster archaeologist named Howard Bennett, under cover of darkness, had stolen a Mayan codex that had just been unearthed. To add insult to injury, Bennett then sent a letter from Merida, apologizing for the theft but stating his intentions to sell the codex and to then disappear into anonymity. The codex, an ancient manuscript in book form, would have brought a total of four such artifacts known to scholars—the other three housed in Dresden, Madrid and Paris—and would be fantastically valuable to museums or private collectors.
Upon arriving at the Tlaloc dig, Gideon finds that several of the amateur archaeologists from a decade earlier have been invited back to continue working on the site along with professionals and a crew of local Mayan laborers. Perhaps not coincidentally, there have been signs of attempted looting of the site since the resumption of the excavation, and it is as much because of this, as well as his expertise in physical anthropology, that Abe has asked for Gideon’s help. A visiting professor of pre-Columbian languages reports to the assembled crew on her translation of a complex Mayan script on the walls of the Temple of Owls—a script that issues a series of curses to any who would desecrate the site—and almost immediately the curses begin to play out. One curse appears to predict the brutal murder of a journalist covering the dig and when Gideon himself is physically attacked, it is obvious that the entire crew may well be under assault. Telltale clues seem to hint that codex had not been removed from the site ten years earlier, but that Howard Bennett has returned with a vengeance to recover it. But has he? It takes both the archaeological as well as the investigative skills of Gideon Oliver to finally solve the mystery of the missing codex and the missing archaeologist.
In addition to spinning a delicious tale of mystery and mayhem, Aaron Elkins delightfully describes the ambiance of the magnificent Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza (a mile from the fictional site of Tlaloc) and the wonderful Hotel Mayaland adjacent to it. Both should be on the bucket list of any devotee of New World archaeology! In addition, the technical details of archaeology and physical anthropology are accurate and authoritative – after all, Elkins did study anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison!
Four trowels of Aaron Elkins’ creation of Gideon Oliver and Curses!
