An Uncertain Currency
 Frances Witlin & Clyde Lynwood Sawyer, Jr.
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 Avocet Press
 ISBN: 0966107276

When Mario was 12 the Sight first came to him at an archaeological dig near his home in Perugia, Italy & his childhood was changed, even his path in life. Once a man Mario took to the stage to perform his Muse, traveled to many countries ending up in America where he solved his first murder case.

Now Mario Castigliani, Internationally Acclaimed Psychic, is an aging, lonely Seer in a frayed silk suit, washed up in a sleepy Southern milltown where he is about to perform for the locals. On the night he arrives one of the town's best beloved & larger-than-life characters is found dangling from a rope in his home, his Bible open at a page on which could be construed his suicide note.

Floraville's young police chief, borne of the warring farmlands & mill owners, an ex-mill worker himself, has nothing to lose & everything to gain when he hires Mario to assist in solving what he knows & can't yet prove, to be a murder.

To Mario, la Lucia, his name for the Muse who gave him the ability to read people's thoughts & divine powerful visions from objects touched, comes & goes at will. She is a jealous Muse & has often demanded his whole devotion, even celibacy.

Into this textile mill town, sweltering in the Southern August heat & fraught with owner/worker union battles, comes this stranger from the big city who can hear the unspoken retorts & suspicions of the unbelieving locals. Mario, by dint of years of skillful people-watching, can also see who loves who & who yearns for what.

Seen from Mario's point of view, the story unfolds in his meetings & listening to the inner thoughts until, in an unwary moment of deprecation he curses la Lucia & away she goes. Then his memories surge in: of his forbidden love with a servant girl & his heartless, abrasive family & of his apprenticeship with Wilhelm Winckler the Wonderworker, a dissolute phony always one step ahead of his debts, always on the prowl for fresh meat.

When the deceased's will is read, all hell breaks loose & the police chief, who has been named a beneficiary, also comes under suspicion.

Meanwhile Mario meets the Editor of the Floraville Weekly Clarion, a keen observer of the minutiae of Floraville's crime & culture & all sorts of possibilities open up for this skilled reader of people.

How the investigation progresses; how Mario's Mind Reading show goes in the high school auditorium; how unresolved ex-marital squabbles escalate; how self-righteous gold diggers handle their greed; how a mean-spirited hotel keeper meets his just rewards & how Mario makes friends & solves both the mystery at hand & a few in his life are the stuff of a grand read.

An Uncertain Currency is a rare feast of memories, depravity, humor & redemption. Great gift material for those who love a thoughtful mystery with a twist!

Frances Witlin passed away in September 1996 at the ripe age of 79, the same day that Hurricane Fran made landfall in North Carolina & did a billion dollars worth of damage--Frances would feel honored. She worked in the story department of Columbia Pictures (East) for many years, & wrote the studio treatments of Dr. Zhivago (from pages smuggled out of the USSR) & Bridge over the River Kwai. For more about Frances Witlin & the writing of this lively read, do check out my Interview with her co-author Clyde Lynwood Sawyer, Jr.
(10/22/00)

Rebecca