The passengers on the train to Mexico City had plenty of
reason to be nervous. Times are rough and there is a railway strike
in Mexico at the moment. Trains everywhere are being tied up and delayed, and
as if that weren’t enough, part of the journey takes the train through a region
that has a rather bad reputation. And then there are the vultures flying
overhead, like an omen of doom. With all that to deal with, the corpse was most
certainly not needed.
But a corpse does pop up in Todd Downing’s Vultures in the Sky, and it is the
corpse of a Mexican man. He has died under strange circumstances, which don’t
necessarily rule out a natural death but which certainly makes the theory far
less tenable than it might otherwise have been. If this is a case of murder,
the killer acted swiftly and murdered the man under circumstances where the
fellow passengers’ vision was impaired. But the killer didn’t count on one man
on board: U.S. Customs Service agent Hugh Rennert.
