Old Ways in the New World: A Mystery at the Smithsonian

This third, often slapstick, Smithsonian Institution mystery featuring Henry Scruggs, on loan there from Foreign Service, substitutes a string of cheap cracks and pratfalls for plot. In 1976, 37 members of the K'ng-Gui tribe, who resemble the Bushmen of Botswana, arrive in the nation's capital to dance at the Great Bicentennial Folk Festival on the mall. They have brought with them their ancestor bugs, objects of worship whose entry into the U.S. Scruggs unwittingly facilitates. Scruggs, doing his best to accommodate the visitors, offends them nevertheless and suffers their traditional retaliation: they urinate on him. The bugs, once admitted, prove voracious, devouring the original Star-Spangled Banner, George Washington's tent and even the reams of paper that Washington bureaucrats require in order to perform their jobs (in triplicate). Meanwhile, beleagured tea-loving, sex-obsessed Henry must solve two murders and stop the invasion of the devil bugs. Readers who like the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy may enjoy this successor to Mr. Smithson's Bones. (June)