The Legend of the Slain Soldiers

Elena Oliverez #2

by Marcia Muller

Tending her museum of Mexican arts during the Santa Barbara Fiesta, Elena Oliverez is shocked when her friend, a historian, is murdered, and she wonders how the killing may be linked to his research on a 1930s legend. Reprint.

Genres: Mystery

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Marcia Muller is an American author of mystery and thriller novels.
Muller has written many novels featuring her Sharon McCone female private detective character. Vanishing Point won the Shamus Award for Best P.I. Novel. Muller had been nominated for the Shamus Award four times previously.
In 2005, Muller was awarded the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master award.
She was born in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up in Birmingham, Michigan, and graduated in English from the University of Michigan and worked as a journalist at Sunset magazine. She is married to detective fiction author Bill Pronzini with whom she has collaborated on several novels.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read, reminiscent of Grafton, except with an amateur. Elena is the director of a museum of Mexican Art in Santa Barbara. She already was instrumental in solving a murder in a previous novel, which was just OK for me. This was a step up. Her mother's friend has been found dead at a retirement mobile home community, it looks as if it was an accident but Mom thinks it was murder. Elena agrees to look further into it. The characters were interesting along with background story involving the history of Mexicans immigrating to the U.S. & settling in CA establishing haciendas, ranches & farms and the 1930's Labor movement and resistance by Hispanics who were now the cheap labor vs. bosses. Good piece of interesting history thrown into the story, along with a little tension between contemporary Hispanics and Anglos. I did not guess who the killer was, which is always a plus for me. No graphic violence or language.

[Pamela Mclaren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elena Oliverez is seeing droves of visitors to the Museum of Mexican Arts where she has been promoted to director, by Santa Barbara's annual Fiesta festivities. But she is torn between her professional activities and family issues: a murder has occurred at the retirement home where her mother lives, a close friend and historian Ciro Siseros.

Why would someone harm the man? Could it be because of his recent searches into the Legend of the Slain Soldiers — a killing of three Mexican-American farm workers during the depression? The police have few clues until they seek out Elena's help. But seeking out clues may very well put Elena in danger.

An interesting story and a good mystery.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

#2 in the Elena Oliveros series. Elena, the young director of Santa Barbara's Mexican Art Museum, has a reputation as a detective after uncovering the killer in The Tree of Death (1983). Police Lt. Dave Kirk also says she in incurably nosy. When her mother asks her to look into the seeming accidental death of Ciro Sisneros, Kirk approves because Elena has a better chance of getting information within the Hispanic comunity.
Historian Sisneros has been warned to stop writing a book about Santa Barbara County during the Great Depression. Elena has a lightweight confrontation with some society folk about the plight of agricultural workers but this serves to link the present to some interesting writing about the conflict of growers and workers during the 1930s.
An interesting description has the growers pitting the Hispanic workers against the "Okies" described in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Elena Oliverez series - Elena's mother Gabriela wants Elena to look into the death of Ciro Sisneros, a historian who has fallen to his death. Gabriela insists that Ciro's death is actually a murder connected to his book--a history of Mexican-American agricultural workers during the Depression--for Ciro had been anonymously warned to stop his research, but had refused.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Competent, but somehow a little too quick in pacing. Early 1985 Marcia Muller mystery exploring a Latino community in Santa Barbara, California, using a little history. Second in a series with Elena Oliverez, museum director, with a passion for crime solving and elevating Mexican culture. Naturally, she is beginning to captivate a handsome police detective, Dave Kirk, while tracking down art depicting 1935 farm labor strife, and trying to discover why someone murdered her mother's neighbor over a book manuscript researching the 1935 conflict between Mexicans and White laborers, and farmers, particularly murders of several Latino union leaders. When someone tries to kill her by running her off a road, she puts her job on hold and instead concentrates on solving the old historical murder which appears to be linked to the murder of the neighbor. It could be anybody! Even the senior citizens in the mobile home park who are taking Judo classes!

Hiee Huh! Hoo! Take that!

[Helen Fleischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

quick, fun read