Mrs. Pollifax Pursued (Mrs. Pollifax Series #11) » (Reprint)

Dorothy Gilman is the author of the Mrs. Pollifax series of novels, as well as several others. She divides her time between Norwalk, Connecticut, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

All Mrs. Pollifax wants on this spring day is the peace and quiet of her Connecticut greenhouse. Then she discovers that a young woman, Kadi Hopkirk, has been hiding in her junk closet for two days. Kadi spills out an improbable story - that since a chance meeting with a childhood friend she has been followed by persons unknown in a sinister van. She's convinced that the henchmen inside are hellbent on finding her. A little experiment on Mrs. P's part proves at least this part of the story correct.

Kadi soon confides the rest of the story - a close tie with an assassinated foreign president and an item in her possession that makes both her and our sleuth moving targets for - someone. When Mrs. P puts in a call for help to her old CIA crony Carstairs, he's wrapped up in the kidnap of a wealthy financier. Before she knows it, what began as a dash for safety and a call for help expands into an assignment that leads to hair-trigger violence in exotic places.

Publishers Weekly

In her 10th adventure, the observant and unflappable Mrs. P. discovers a young woman hiding in a closet of her Connecticut home on the same day that she observes a suspicious white van patrolling the neighborhood. Kadi Hopkirk says the men in the van have been following her ever since she met Sammy, a childhood friend from the African country of Ubangiba, in New Haven, where he told her he was being guarded and secretly gave something for safekeeping. Mrs. Pollifax hides Kadi in the car and takes to the highway but is unable to shake the van until she calls on two former colleagues at the CIA, who send a helicopter to whisk them away to a traveling carnival in rural Maine. Mrs. Pollifax, last seen in Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief (1994), poses as a journalist, and Kadi becomes the lower half of the woman who is sawed in two, while the CIA pals find out who Sammy is and why he is being so heavily guarded. Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Gilman, a deft stylist, adroitly resolves her plot's mysteries, finally bringing together a stabbing at the carnival, Kadi and Sammy's story and the abduction of a wealthy executive. Mystery Guild selection. (Feb.)