Jerold Last

Roger Bowman and Suzanne Foster Bowman seemingly can’t visit South America without getting tangled up in a bloody murder case. Their current trip to Salta, Argentina isn’t going to be the exception that proves the rule. Little did Roger suspect that buying a couple of alpaca sweaters for Suzanne to celebrate their third wedding anniversary would plunge the detective couple into another South American murder mystery. In “The Body in the Alpaca Pasture” Roger and Suzanne are asked by their friend, an overworked homicide detective based more than half a day’s drive from the scene of the crime, to visit a small town in his jurisdiction where there was a baffling killing a few days earlier. He wants Roger and Suzanne to advise him whether or not it is worth wasting his time investigating the murder before adding the skimpy file to his already large stack of unsolved cases.

Somebody shot a modern-day gaucho in the back at an isolated alpaca breeding facility in the small town of Molinos, high in the Andes Mountains in Argentina’s northwest province of Salta. In this isolated area far off the beaten track for tourists, everybody at the research facility had an opportunity to shoot the victim without being observed committing the crime. This isn’t a crime that will be solved by CSI. There aren’t any fingerprints, footprints, a murder weapon, or other traditional clues conveniently left around the cadaver by the killer. The local police (both of them) are glorified meter maids, totally untrained to solve a mysterious murder like this one. By the time Roger and Suzanne arrive the corpse has long since been sent to the nearest hospital for an autopsy, the results of which have been lost by the local bumbling authorities. What was the motive? Why was the victim targeted? Was it murder for gain? Roger and Suzanne interrogate the remaining staff members at the alpaca breeding facility as they seek evidence proving the existence of a sinister international conspiracy to explain the reason Oswaldo Pepin died. This fast paced whodunit mystery features an exotic setting, a complex murder case, and a fast paced and suspenseful plot.