Agates Are Forever: A Nick Cameron Mystery

Terret cleverly riffs on hardboiled fiction tropes in his promising debut, which centers on Nick Cameron, an Arizona geologist with a knack for finding corpses. When the beautiful Theo Metaxas seeks Cameron’s help selling a large cache of agates, he connects her with local lapidaries Paco Madero and Joey Huerta. On the day Theo and Cameron are scheduled to meet with Paco and Joey, however, they discover both men dead. Police cast suspicion on Theo, citing her involvement with a museum trust that Paco and Joey stood to inherit, but Cameron believes in her innocence. He teams up with Frankie Benally, a half-Navajo jeweler with sharp detecting skills, to clear Theo’s name. Their investigation sends them across the Mexican border in pursuit of a man caught on Paco’s security cameras near the time of the murder; soon, however, Cameron and Frankie stumble into a complicated conspiracy dating back to the days of Pancho Villa. Terret works in a grinning, self-aware register, piling on red herrings and suspects to deliriously entertaining effect, though the surplus of two-dimensional bombshells among the female cast grows tiresome. Still, noir fans will hope for a sequel. Agent: Jennifer Utner, Utner Agency. (Jan.)