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THE KING'S LIZARD
by Pamela Christie
Lone Butte Press, August 2004
368 pages
$13.95
ISBN: 0966686047


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In 1782, New Mexico is an extremely precarious colony of Spain, beset by hostile natives and a very long way from assistance or supplies. It does have the considerable advantage of an intelligent and resourceful leader, in the person of Governor Juan Bautista de Anza, yet mischief and tragedy seem to dog the frontier settlements and it's beginning to look like even Anza will not be able to keep the colony safe.

Nando Aguilar is a young man of mixed race, a serious handicap in more established realms, but here on the remote fringes of the empire, a little less so. He has two older brothers who are fully Spanish and making their way in that world, and a younger brother and sister who returned with their mother to the Ute people when Nando's father died. He is educated in both cultures and able to move comfortably in both, plus he has a facility for being unobtrusive, like the geckos that cling unobserved to desert walls.

To avoid being pressed into service in the militia, Nando reluctantly signs on with some fairly unsavoury traders and soon it becomes clear that among their trade goods are children, stolen from hostile Indian tribes. Nando manages to escape, with the aid of his brother Carlos, a lieutenant in Anza's army, and Anza then asks for his help.

There are so many questions to be investigated: is the mayor's son involved in this illegal slave trade? Who leaked information causing the annual supply shipment to be attacked and destroyed? How could a trusted scout have mistaken a party of Comanches for hostile Apaches, causing the army to ambush and kill them before realizing its mistake, destroying months of work toward a treaty? Who has brutally murdered two militia sentries? Nando sets out to see what he can find out, discovering some friends and some enemies in surprising places.

I very much enjoyed this book; the narrative moves along very well and the characters are engaging. There are several interesting twists, exciting dangers, and a nice little love story. It also has -- I love this -- maps and a glossary, as well as a brief historical timeline and an extensive list of research resources.

I had a very small problem with some of the language used -- I found a few turns of phrase jarred me out of the period by being too modern (a reference to libido, a couple of uses of the phrase "I'm out of here", and describing someone as "strung-out looking"). However, this is an inescapable difficulty when writing historicals, since the story obviously cannot be told in 18th-century colonial Spanish, with lashings of Ute. Writing such a tale requires it to be, in effect, a translation into modern English and how modern to make it is to some extent a matter of taste. In any event, a small quibble only and an otherwise admirable work.

Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, April 2006

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