In her most recent release, Culture Shock, author Cindy Hull reintroduces protagonist Claire Aguila, an anthropologist, who discovers the seedy underbelly of a seemingly innocent world of a Florida retirement community.
"I want him out of my business and out of my life."
Barbara Vogel had confided this to her friends in The Havens, a luxury Florida retirement community. But soon afterward, Barbara lay dead in her home with a bullet wound in her chest. Days later, a Hispanic laborer is also found dead with Barbara's gun and jewelry in his possession.
Soon arrives anthropologist Aguila with her daughter to visit her parents, only to find that her father is a possible suspect in the Vogel murder. The drama intensifies when Mexican detective Roberto Salinas and Claire's friend and colleague, Madge Carmichael, unexpectedly arrive on the scene.
The threesome attempt to solve the two murders, complicating local Detective Davenport's job. Once again, Madge proves to be a resourceful, if unconventional, sleuth. While Davenport faces friction within his own team, Claire and her entourage seek to bridge the cultural divide between the retirement community's upscale residents and the Hispanic workforce who makes their lifestyle possible.
Culture Shock is the second mystery in the Claire Aguila series and is a stand-alone novel to Hull's first mystery, Human Sacrifice.
Author Cindy Hull employs her skills as a professor of anthropology to make sharp observations of life in a gated retirement community in central Florida, where murder lurks just a golf cart drive away. Spot-on characters, the minutiae and paranoia of the gated lifestyle, and the racial profiling of The Havens' Mexican workforce make this whodunit an especially enjoyable mystery.
- Robert Downes, author, Windigo Moon, The Wolf and The Willow
Dr. Cindy L. Hull is an anthropologist and Professor Emeritus from Grand Valley State University. Her research interests have taken her to Mexico, Micronesia, and rural Michigan. She has published two ethnographies: Katun: A Twenty-Year Journey with the Maya; and Chippewa Lake: A Community in Search of an Identity.
In retirement, Cindy has pursued her love of mystery novels by writing two murder mysteries, introducing her protagonist, Dr. Claire Aguila. Cindy's first novel, Human Sacrifice, takes place in the Yucatán Peninsula, where she and her husband lived and studied among the Maya. Her newest mystery, Culture Shock, explores the mysterious world of the Florida retirement community.
Alas, Cindy has not succumbed to the allure of life in a retirement community. Instead, she happily resides with her husband in Traverse City, Michigan.
As Cindy Hull spins her absorbing whodunit, set in a gated Florida retirement community rich with intrigue, she also asks us to consider who we are. More than a mystery, Culture Shock is a commentary on the fragile bubbles that 21st century Americans exist in, and what happens when they bump or burst.
-Cari Noga, author, Sparrow Migrations, The Orphan Daughter
