Culture Shock

"I want him out of my business and out of my life."

When Barbara Vogel confided this to her friends in The Havens, a Florida retirement community, no one suspected that Barbara would soon lay dead in her home with a bullet wound in her chest. And that days later, an Hispanic laborer would be found dead with Barbara's gun and jewelry in his possession. 

Soon arrives anthropologist Claire Aguila, who a year before had helped solve murders in Mexico. She visits Claire's parents in The Havens with her daughter, only to find that her father is a possible suspect in the Vogel murder. The family drama intensifies when Mexican Detective Roberto Salinas and Madge Carmichael arrive on the scene.

This unlikely reunion complicates Detective Davenport's job as Claire and her companions become involved, and, 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 comfortable world of the affluent residents and the world of those who make 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 Yucatn 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.