The Legend of the Slain Soldiers

Ciro Sisneros seems the most harmless of men-a Chicano historian immersed in writing a book about the Great Depression and the Mexican-American agricultural workers of that era. Then why, when he dies of a fall at pool-side in Leisure Village Mobile Home Park, a senior citizens’ community near Santa Barbara, does Gabriel a Oliverez insist that he has been murdered?

True, Ciro had been warned by an anonymous caller to stop work on his book-something he had no intention of doing. Gabriela wants her daughter, Elena, to put aside the urgent demands of her job as curator of the Museum of Mexican Art and find out why the book was a threat-and to whom. Hadn’t Elena solved the murder of her predecessor (in Muller’s The Tree of Death)?

That’s not an easy thing for Elena to do. The museum is understaffed. Fiesta time is upon them. One of the museum’s volunteer workers suddenly disappears. There are countless other demands on the young curator’s time. And the chairman of the museum board, Carlos Bautista, is courting her. Although she likes him well enough, she does not welcome the attentions of a man twenty-six years her senior, and she feels uncomfortable among his rich Anglo friends. But how to avoid him without antagonizing him?

However, as Police Lieutenant Dave Kirk (whose attentions Elena would welcome) says of her, she is incurably nosy. Her nosiness, in fact, causes more than one attempt on her life. Only by going far back into the past-and making a visit to Abuela (Grandmother) Felicia, who had been active in the agricultural workers’ struggles of the thirties-does Elena learn the truth behind the legend of the slain soldiers and how it ties in with the very recent death of Ciro Sisneros.