Marcia Muller: The Legend of the Slain Soldiers (USA 1987)

From the Publisher:
STILL LIFE WITH A CORPSE
Elena Oliverez's profession is director of a Santa Barbara art museum, but her sideline is detection. So when Police Lieutenant Dave Kirk showed her the blue swimming pool, gray concrete planter, and stark-white chalk outline where a body had lain, she thought it a most aesthetically composed background for murder.

Elena soon discovered that this killing was the by-product of a decades-old murder. And as she kept scratching the surface, a typically Californian scene emerged: rich Anglos, bright immigrant dreams, and dark new ways to kill them. It was the kind of murder mystery that fascinated Elena, the sleuth. And there was an obliging killer around who knew she was dying to solve it...

"ENGROSSING." -- Publishers Weekly

Marcia Muller: The Legend of the Slain Soldiers. Art endures but life is short - when murder enters the picture. An Elena Oliverez Mystery. Signet Mystery AE5050, ISBN: 0451150503 (November, 1987), 223 p., $3.50.

Marcia Muller: The Legend of the Slain Soldiers (USA 1985)

From the Publisher:
Ciro Sisneros seems the most harmless of men -- a Chicano historian immersed in writing a book about the Great Depression and the Mexican-American agricultural workers of that era. Then why, when he dies of a fall at pool-side in Leisure Village Mobile Home Park, a senior citizens' community near Santa Barbara, does Gabriel a Oliverez insist that he has been murdered?

True, Ciro had been warned by an anony¬mous caller to stop work on his book -- something he had no intention of doing. Gabriela wants her daughter, Elena, to put aside the urgent demands of her job as curator of the Museum of Mexican Art and find out why the book was a threat -- and to whom. Hadn't Elena solved the murder of her predecessor (in Muller's The Tree of Death)?

That's not an easy thing for Elena to do. The museum is understaffed. Fiesta time is upon them. One of the museum's volunteer workers suddenly disappears. There are countless other demands on the young curator's time. And the chairman of the museum board, Carlos Bautista, is courting her. Although she likes him well enough, she does not welcome the attentions of a man twenty-six years her senior, and she feels uncomfortable among his rich Anglo friends. But how to avoid him without antagonizing him?

However, as Police Lieutenant Dave Kirk (whose attentions Elena would welcome) says of her, she is "incurably nosy." Her nosiness, in fact, causes more than one attempt on her life. Only by going far back into the past -- and making a visit to "Abuela" (Grandmother) Felicia, who had been active in the agricultural workers' struggles of the thirties -- does Elena learn the truth behind the legend of the slain soldiers and how it ties in with the very recent death of Ciro Sisneros.

Marcia Muller: The Legend of the Slain Soldiers. An Elena Oliverez Mystery. Walker & Co., ISBN: 0802756174 (July, 1985), 174 p., $13.95.