Mrs. Pollifax on Safari

Mrs. Pollifax on Safari / Dorothy Gilman
read by Barbara Rosenblat
Ashland, OR: Blackstone Publishing, 1992, c1976.

 

Continuing my run of the Mrs. Pollifax series, I've made it to book five. In Mrs. Pollifax on Safari, we find Emily heading to Zambia, assigned to join a safari and take photos of all the others in the group. Carstairs just needs photos so they can try to figure out the identity of a political assassin who has eluded all the intelligence agencies. They think he'll be on this safari to meet his next contact - so no theatrics, just photos to share with the CIA when she returns. But of course things quickly get much more complicated and Mrs. Pollifax finds herself in the centre of a few different imbroglios. 

On the safari, she needs to be suspicious of everyone. Who knows who the assassin really is? But she meets Cyrus, a retired judge and fellow American, who is travelling with his adult daughter. Surely he can't be her target -- thankfully so, as they begin to develop an affinity during the days that follow. 

The set-up, a closed group of suspects that Emily has to carefully examine, gives great opportunity for character development and description. I greatly enjoyed that part and also the descriptions of the Zambian countryside. The Mrs. Pollifax stories are like travelogues and that is one of the delights of them for me. 

The characters in this story are all quite intriguing, ranging from quite ordinary to eccentric to boorish to completely delusional. There are some chilling parts of this story, as Mrs. Pollifax finds herself in darker circumstances than expected. And some startling turns in the story too, to keep you on your toes.

Once again I listened to the audio version read by the delightful Barbara Rosenblat. She rarely makes a misstep but in this one, one of the characters, a doctor from a charity hospital elsewhere in Zambia, is originally Canadian. And I don't know why she gave him an accent but it made me laugh out loud when it started. It had the weirdest tinge of both Maritimes and Mike from Canmore. 

But a good read and the enjoyable return of a character from the first volume in this series made it extra fun. I'm really liking this whole series so far.