Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish

This spirited mystery featuring part-time secret agent Emily Pollifax shows the kindly grandmother at her resourceful best. Her superiors in the Atlas Group (an unofficial branch of the CIA) have dispatched Emily to Morocco to provide a cover for another of their agents, Max Janko. Emily will pose as Max's aunt to make the pair look like tourists, while in reality they will be trying to identify all seven agents in order to ferret out the mole who has recently infiltrated the Atlas network. Emily is bewildered when she finds Janko not only insufferably hostile and that he intends to kill her. Before long, a murder has occurred, and Emily and her inexperienced companion are running for their lives from one village to the next, show more desperately trying to find the informer and save the rest of the network.

Mrs Pollifax is humorous , adventurous, curious, daring, and unpredictable. I love these books as a quick light read when I want to see some of the world and be entertained at the same time. show less

Another journey with Emily Pollifax (thank you, Interlibrary Loans!). And I learned a LOT. Like for instance did you even know about the Moroccan-Western Sahara war? Me either, but it's a doozy. Still a problem, too.

But as always, Mrs. Pollifax is an immersion into world events, history, and exotic, meticulously rendered locales. Always well off the beaten path, but geopolitically significant, too.

Thanks again, Ms. Gilman, for a much needed escape, and another novel I could barely put down!

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

****

A somewhat below-average Pollifax adventure. The main issue with it is the pacing -- it took at least 70 pages for the story to really get moving, and considering the book is only about 224 pages in total (at least my edition), that's pretty slow. However, once it is revealed that Janko is an impostor and Mrs. Pollifax has to fight for her life, it picks up and the rest of the story is quite good. And of course Dorothy Gilman is always one for the excellent sense of place. Morocco is the setting for this book and it is very beautifully described.

Character-wise, it was nice to see Carstairs and Bishop again. I could have sworn Bishop and Mrs. Pollifax had the exact same dialogue about kitchens show more ("I like kitchens," Bishop said. "Bachelors hardly ever see the inside of one.") in a previous book, but nevertheless it made me smile. And Mornajay, Carstairs' boss! Good old Mornajay. I'd forgotten about him. It was nice to see him too.

To sum up, if you're new to Pollifax, don't start with this one, and if you're a Pollifax veteran, you have to really want to read this one. Don't read it half-heartedly. show less

This was my first Mrs. Pollifax book, but they clearly don't need to be read in order. All you need to know is that Mrs. Pollifax is an older woman (not sure if she's quite "elderly" but definitely post-retirement age) who sometimes does special undercover missions for the CIA. This time around she's supposed to pose as the aunt of another agent in Morocco, but things go wrong from the beginning. This book was published in 1990 so there are parts that feel quite dated, but in general it's a neat peek into a part of the country tourists don't usually see. Mrs. Pollifax herself is just ridiculously charming, and the adventure is fast-paced without being stressful. I'll have to pick up more of these at some point.

This was another fun Emily Pollifax adventure. Of course, I disliked the original Jacko and enjoyed the real Jacko (though I thought he was a bit of a gloomy Gus, but that made a change from Emily's usual cheeriness), loved the mystic, and the young acolyte. I missed Cyrus's good sense and why humor. I experienced this book on audio and though the reader was very good I was at first unhappy with her voice for the real Jacko, because she did it in an Indian accent. Later it was revealed that he'd spent his formative years in India, so then it made sense, but I still found it strange on occasion when he was speaking and translating one of the Arabic languages. All around a nice way to spend a boring day doing chores.

I had read and enjoyed several of the books in this series as a teen, and then not revisited Mrs. Pollifax for many years before I re-read the opening book in the series again last year and found it just as entertaining as I had remembered it. So when I spotted Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish on the shelf at the library, I decided that maybe it was time to try another.

I think of these books as cozy mystery meets James Bond, and this one is no different. It is one of the later books in the series; our heroine has picked up a husband and been shaken by trauma in the meantime. The book opens with Mrs. Pollifax, after an extended period without any assignments, worrying that she’s washed up as agent. But opportunity soon knocks, show more and she is sent off on what is expected to be a short, safe little mission to Morocco. Of course, the assignment quickly turns out otherwise.

Overall I found this book somewhat disappointing. People and factions are very much black and white, and snap judgements unerringly prove correct. Coincidence is consistently called upon as a plot device. None of which keeps me from admitting that the heroine’s ultimate triumph over long odds left me with at least a vague sense of satisfaction. The setting and the depiction of Moroccan history and culture were the most interesting things about the book.

Fans of the series will probably enjoy this book, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an entry point for new readers. show less

You can see the changing world state in the progression of this series. Here Mrs. Pollifax enters Morocco. I love the way Mrs. Pollifax's instincts and even personality traits stand her in such good stead all the time. This book is reminiscent of her adventures in Turkey and even in Albania - just how many times has she gone into hiding as a native woman, draped in voluminous robes??