Ask Me for Tomorrow

Rating:
Summary: Elusive Husbands, Grandiose Schemes
Review: One of America's best classical mystery story writers, Margaret Millar, always provides her readers with convincing characters embroiled in thrilling and ingenious plots.

ASK FOR ME TOMORROW introduces her young lawyer sleuth, Tomas Aragon, a Spanish-speaking Californian of charm and intelligence. He is hired by a wealthy woman to find her ex-husband, B.J. Lockwood, who eight years earlier ran off to Mexico with his 15-year-old pregnant girlfriend. From a letter received, the former wife knows that Lockwood was involved with a dubious individual named Jenkins in a grandiose scheme to convert the girl's primitive Baja California fishing village into a tourist resort.

Tomas Aragon makes two trips to this colorful part of the world and soon discovers that the resort scheme failed badly and that both promoters have since disappeared. In the course of many interviews he does his best to track down the elusive husband, but his task is not made easier by three brutal murders. After run-ins with a variety of characters - some comic, some uncomfortably sinister, all very real - Aragon discovers the surprising truth.

The Mexican setting has a wonderful air of authenticity and the dialogue is sharp and witty. This is a crime novel that will keep the reader beguiled and guessing to the very end.