Incident at LA Junta — Oliver Lange

KIRKUS REVIEW: Incident is just that -- with all that is providential (improvidential really) and done-with-once-it's-over that the word implies -- one of those less fateful appointments in Samarra which in this case is a dusty deadspot in Mexico. To which Keith and Jocelyn have come in a camper, just one step up from the sleeping bag and representing the usual bit from yoga to Jung to Laing.

Very simply, like the book, Jocelyn's premonitions that Mexico is evasive and evil are fulfilled; Keith dies suddenly of a massive heart attack although otherwise he's in the prime of life (""hotter than a fox eighteen hours a day"") while Jocelyn is detained there after bubonic plague breaks out. Just when she's free to leave, she's knifed and killed. . . .

Lange wrote Vandenberg which had a few political repercussions beyond its show of violence; this is the kind of book you read not questioning yourself because it has a fair grab but rather just why the author wrote it except to prove the unpremeditated nature of life or rather death.