MATT BONDURANT – The Third Translation. Hyperion, hardcover, 2005; trade paperback, April 2006.

YXTA MAYA MURRAY– The Queen Jade. Rayo / HarperCollins, hardcover, 2005. Harper, trade paperback, June 2008.

   Although neither of these novels appeared to be a conventional mystery, each of them had some element that caught my eye.

   Bondurant’s first novel traces the frantic adventures of Dr. Walter Rothschild, an American Egyptologist, who’s working on a translation of an Egyptian funerary stone at the British Museum. A night on the town with some questionable associates leads him to the unwise decision to slip into the museum after hours with an attractive young woman who expresses an interest in his work. After some steamy sex, she flees, taking with her a papyrus whose recovery leads Walter into some strange byways of London and environs that leave him both emotionally and physically damaged.

   Murray’s The Queen Jade, identified as a novel of adventure, features a young bookstore owner, the daughter of archaeologists, who treks into the hurricane-damaged jungles of Guatemala in search of her mother who disappeared looking for the legendary Queen Jade, a stone that could offer great power to its possessor.

   Bondurant is the more academic of the two writers, and his choice of a flawed protagonist who runs from one threatening situation to another, is stronger in its flashbacks, which evoke Walter’s childhood in Egypt with his engineer father, than in its somewhat muddled framing story. I read this with increasing distraction but did manage to finish it.

   Murray, the author of three previous novels, has created an attractive heroine (Lola Sanchez), with just enough of an ersatz archaeological underpinning to ground her suspenseful and, at times, exciting story. A book dealer heroine and a quest for an archaeological treasure are the perfect complements for a well-written adventure novel, and they quickly replaced the disappointment I felt with The Third Translation with a great deal of serendipitous pleasure.

Bibliographic Note:   A followup to the Yxta Maya Murray book is The King’s Gold (2008), in which Lola Sanchez must deal with “a stolen fortune in Montezuma’s gold — and of the thief’s transformation from conquistatore to alchemist … to werewolf.”