In the Navel of the Moon: A Tale from Mexico

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This novel is an act of wizardry in which nothing is as it seems. What
begins as a faintly folksy yarn about a Canadian writer doing nothing
very much in a small Mexican town evolves into high comedy and ends up
as a mystery about drug smuggling. Our hero, a retired newspaperman who
acts as an amateur spy for the drug sleuths in Ottawa, seems to be a
dismal failure at the spy business, but his routine powers of
observation lead to great discoveries (even if his intuition is somewhat
off course).

Bureaucrats, know-it-alls, and academics come in for a good measure of
the author’s dry wit, but much of the humor stems from the charm of
the Mexican spirit, which can spin a fiesta out of empty air but cannot
fix an ailing toilet. St. Pierre dishes up his acute perceptions of the
absurd with unfailing good humor.