Link Mystery Shopping

The co-owner of a Toronto antiques store, Lara McClintoch is obsessed with finding rare and beautiful artifacts. Her travels take her to the ends of the earth, where history jealously guards its treasures -- and where the mysteries of the past meet the dangers of the present... At an auction house in Toronto, Lara picks up a box of what she thinks are worthless Peruvian reproductions -- only to find that they are authentic artifacts of the Moche, an ancient people whose civilization predates the Incas. When her assistant is brutally attacked and her shop burned, Lara realizes that she is an unwitting link in a chain of black-market collectors. Now she must journey to Peru and do battle with an army of grave robbers who are as ruthless -- and deadly -- as the Moche warriors themselves...

Rules of the Lake is Ziegler's fiction debut, a collection of linked stories about growing up on a lake in "preDisney" central Florida in the 1960s, before orange groves were bulldozed to make way for shopping plazas and bushes were trimmed to look like Mouseketeers. The stories trace the maturation of smart, funny Annie Bartlett, who recounts her adventurous childhood on Widow Lake. She's obsessed with the desire to learn to breathe underwater so she can become a mermaid. In her reckless pursuit of this fantasy, Annie grapples with the constraints imposed by her father's lake rules (No Swimming Alone, No Swimming After Dark, No Diving in Unknown Waters) and is forced to confront, among other things, her own mortality. The title story introduces us to the Bartlett family: nine-year-old Annie; rebellious and sullen Leigh, her older sister; their philandering father, Ed; and their mother, Helen, whose drowning is the central mystery of the collection. In "The Treasure Hunter's Daughter" Annie accompanies her feckless father to an abandoned dump on one of his many get-rich-quick schemes. When she's badly cut on a potentially valuable bottle during the dig, she learns to her dismay that her father's first thought is to retrieve the bottle before taking care of his daughter's wound. In "The Waiting List" Annie's intense desire to belong to something larger than herself -- to Teresa Hatcher's Girl Scout troop -- causes her to allow herself to be exploited and, in turn, callously to use an outsider for her own purposes. In "Cliffs Notes" Annie accompanies Leigh to a gay bar where Leigh judges a drag queen contest and baits her English teacher who happens to be there. When events getout of hand, it is up to Annie to get herself and her sister out of harm's way. Rules of the Lake celebrates the power and endurance of myth and childhood imagination in the midst of loss, love, and change.