Bodies in Motion

E. Jane Philipps is head of the Biology Library at Queen’s University
in Kingston.

Commissioned to write a screenplay set on an Amtrak express traveling
between Chicago and Los Angeles—an updated version of Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes—playwright and accidental sleuth Matthew Prior
embarks on a first-class trip on one of Amtrak’s star transcontinental
trains.

This fourth Matthew Prior mystery is an amusing and convoluted tale,
laden with references to Hitchcock’s thriller and Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express. In the opening chapters, we are introduced
to an amazingly diverse cast of characters, including an African prince,
a troop of boy scouts, an investigative journalist, CIA agents, a
bourbon-swilling divorcée, an Irish governess, a charlatan mystic, a
pair of comic-book artists, a heavyweight prize fighter, a
shape-changing assassin, and a notorious glamor queen. Under the
umbrella of an Eastern European political intrigue, an equally complex
web of plots and subplots unfold and interconnect as Prior’s train
journeys across the United States.

Quogan writes with ease and wit, and the personalities and storylines
of the assembled voyagers provide a satisfying mix of the strange and
the familiar. Although Bodies in Motion is no match for the classics it
echoes, devotees of the genre will find it a pleasant diversion.