moviemaking

This sweeping, enjoyable epic by Peter Blauner isn’t really a mystery, though it has a crime at its center.  Like the Mrs. Pollifax books (which also treasure and honor different cultures), this is an adventure novel, containing a crime.  The premise is this: young Alex, the pride of his Egyptian-American family, accepted into an Ivy League university, had disappeared.  It becomes obvious to his family that he’s joined some kind of radical group somewhere in the Middle East. He refuses to communicate with his parents, but then his grandfather, Ali, reaches out to him and it’s this connection that Alex chooses to pursue. read more