The Aztec

Vidal (The Clayton Account) plays “what if” with an actual event—the transfer of Spain’s gold reserves to the Soviet Union at the start of the Spanish Civil War—in this thought-provoking novel of foreign intrigue. When part of that shipment, worth about $200 million in today’s dollars, disappears in November 1936, only the reclusive Mexican revolutionary, Jesús Florin (aka “the Aztec”), may know the gold’s whereabouts. After years of stonewalling various publishers, Jesús has finally agreed to have his biography written by Jack Hadley, a British visiting professor at the University of Salamanca. Jack is excited about the job, until the Spanish Secret Service trumps up a phony drug charge against the historian in an effort to get him to focus his research less on Jesús’s political life and more on the missing gold’s location. The occasionally jerky plot loses focus toward the end on a tangent involving a planned coup in Africa, but the author effectively blends history and fiction. (Nov.)