Night over Mexico (A Hugh Rennert Mystery)

Hugh Rennert, now retired from the U. S. customs service and cultivating a citrus grove in Cameron County, Texas, again finds himself south of the border, motoring through the mountains to Victoria to settle a legal dispute with the Mexican owners of a tract of land bordering his own. Stranded by the chipi chipi-an endless drizzling, enervating rain-and the landslide that it produces, Rennert seeks shelter-along with the ten other people who have preceded him-in a providentially located ranch house. At least the ranch house, "a square, one-storied, fortresslike house of adobe roofed with tiles," seems providentially located-until the people stranded there start dying! Who will survive this deadliest of nights over Mexico? Tonight no one is safe: not the frightened schoolteacher Miss Pirtle and her devil-may-care driver Mr. Woodmansee, nor those toughs Bohannon and Lurcott, nor the mysterious Mr. Smith, his daughter Wilma and her pistol-packing beau, Keith Kerwick, nor the exceedingly irritating Gulliver Damson, Ph. D., nor the Midwestern oil tycoon Jesse Elkins and his fatally attractive, decades younger wife, Vera, nor even Hugh Rennert himself. Night over Mexico is the final Hugh Rennert mystery. Does it chronicle Hugh Rennert's last night on Earth? Read on and see what happens in this superb Golden Age detective novel, originally published in 1937, about which the Saturday Review raved: "Actions and suspense at concert pitch throughout, characterization vivid, background exotic, method and motive of murder unique. . . . Excellent." As the New York Times Book Review put it, Todd Downing "has again shown us that Mexico, in the hands of one who knows it, makes an excellent background for a mystery story."