Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish

Locations
Call Number: BOCD Mystery
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD Mystery	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"With tracks every 3 minutes for easy book marking"--Container.
Compact discs.
Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat.
All Mrs. Pollifax has to do is help a bumbling CIA agent confirm the identities of seven undercover informants in Morocco. A simple assignment. But right away, things go wrong. The first informant is murdered just after Mrs. P. identifies him in Fez. Worse, she has the frightening sensation that her associate is not who or what he says he is.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

School Library Journal Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Mrs P goes to Morocco submitted by camelsamba on July 4, 2016, 10:48pm Cyrus is off visiting his daughter and newly arrived grandchild while Emily is suffering a case of January blahs. Just as she begins to dwell on a creeping suspicion that Carstairs might consider her too old, Bishop calls and she commits to do a 'simple' mission in Morocco. As usual, the simple mission turns out to be much more treacherous than anticipated.

As in Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, the descriptions of the landscape and people made me want to visit the location - in this case, Morocco. Quite a bit of its recent history is described as well (recent relative to when the book was published, that is!). There are a couple of subtexts in this story. The first is the ravages (?) of age (Mrs P & her doubts, Bishop and his 'mid-life crisis' rental Jaguar, Mornajay and his changed approach to life). The second is the treatment of women. At one point Emily is told that she will be viewed as inferior. Not long after meeting the initial contact, his rudeness is starting to beat her down until she decides she will "not allow his hostility to diminish her sense of self." And later, after their first stop on the road and still suffering cutting rudeness from him: "she realized she had encountered one of the more devastating kinds of loneliness in existence -- that of being in close contact with someone to whom she was a non-person and who thereby rendered her invisible, of no consequence." But in the end, her quick thinking and valor -- not to mention the karate skills! -- are acknowledged and valued.

(Although I usually like the reader for this series, I did not like her choice of accent for Max.)