Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Tears of the Jaguar
    Tears of the Jaguar
    Tears of the Jaguar
    Audiobook11 hours

    Tears of the Jaguar

    Written by A.J. Hartley

    Narrated by Tanya Eby

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Six months ago, museum curator Deborah Miller had never heard of Ek Balam, an obscure Mayan archaeological site known for its carved figures. Now here she is, having traded Atlanta’s urban jungle for a remote village in Mexico’s Yucatan, tasked with overseeing Ek Balam’s excavation. But when a sudden rainstorm causes a partial collapse at the site, an unexpected treasure is unearthed: a collection of rough-cut rubies hidden from the world for hundreds of years—and very out-of-place in the Yucatan. It is a find of immeasurable value, one that Deborah vows to protect—and yet is powerless to prevent from being stolen soon after its discovery. Determined to retrieve the stones, she sets out to trace their complex history across four centuries and two continents, from Mexico to northern England where the jewels once played a harrowing role in the Lancashire witch trials of 1612. But Deborah is not the only one searching for the stones; close on her heels are archaeologists, occultists, and one very determined arms dealer, all of whom will stop at nothing, not even murder, to claim the prize for themselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 4, 2012
    ISBN9781469211923
    Tears of the Jaguar
    Author

    A.J. Hartley

    A. J. Hartley is a native of Lancashire, England, and was born near the town where the witch trials featured in Tears of the Jaguar occurred four hundred years ago. He lived in Japan for several years and traveled extensively throughout southern and eastern Asia before moving to the United States for graduate school. After earning his Ph.D. from Boston University, he taught college-level Shakespeare in Georgia and North Carolina. Today he works as a dramaturg, director, theater historian, and theorist in Renaissance drama at UNC-Charlotte, where he holds the Robinson Chair of Shakespeare Studies. He has written fiction for twenty years and is the author of Macbeth, a Novel with David Hewson, Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact, Act of Will, Will Power, The Mask of Atreus, On the Fifth Day, and What Time Devours.

    More audiobooks from A.J. Hartley

    Related to Tears of the Jaguar

    Related audiobooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Beyond the Mangrove Trees

      Aug 6, 2020

      No one expects their house to float away. Ethel certainly hadn’t. Our story begins in the sleepy village of Greenwood, where Ethel had spent her entire life. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon and Ethel watched the rain lash against the window from

      7 min read

    • Article

      THE Dark Light

      Oct 28, 2020

      THE Dark Light
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Farm Incident

      Apr 25, 2018

      The Farm Incident
      10 min read

    • Article

      Shula And The Sun

      Oct 13, 2017

      Shula And The Sun
      8 min read

    • Article

      Ursula K. Le Guin

      Jun 15, 2018

      He was thinking of Lookfar, abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. As he drifted near sleep he began to remember sailing t

      15 min read

    • Article

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?

      Aug 8, 2019

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Way Back Home

      Apr 30, 2022

      Morning light in Sydney has a quality of powdered gold, spilt celestial talcum. It gets up the nose. The streets seem to have nothing to think about other than parking and shopping, violence a concept from another hemisphere. The calm seems deliberat

      6 min read

    • Article

      Practicing

      Mar 15, 2018

      This would have been her favorite season in the Allegheny woods. The shadows of the trees were rickety, and the wind had sap in its scent. But last week, Ty had left; now one day decayed into the next. Their house was abandoned. Only their father, si

      18 min read

    • Article

      Shelter

      May 28, 2022

      Shelter
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Best Rain in Literature

      Apr 14, 2020

      The Best Rain in Literature
      11 min read

    • Article

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson

      Jun 25, 2018

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Sack of Silence

      Sep 8, 2020

      “WAIT TILL I TURNT HIS OFF. NOW.” “That noise. Whatever is it?” “The Hoover was running.” “How’s that?” “I said, I was running the vacuum.” “Not that. Outside. Listen.” Rosie leaned over the banister. “Oh, it’s the bee, dear.” “Bee nothing. A thousan

      7 min read

    • Article

      New World

      Aug 2, 2018

      New World
      2 min read

    • Article

      All It Takes Is A Spark

      Nov 25, 2019

      All It Takes Is A Spark
      5 min read

    • Article

      To Save Arrhinsal

      Oct 1, 2021

      Tolin lives on Arrhinsal, an island that floats in the sky two miles above the land below. One day, while hunting in the maze of tunnels that run through the island’s thick hedges, he encounters a girl who, her sword raised, has turned to face a huge

      9 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      Magnets: Carried through time, lovers seek their purpose.

      Feb 6, 2014

      Moon Colony B, 2213 Former Ponzi-schemer Mary Pillar digs through a trashcan. It smells like rotten eggs and milk. She is elderly and homeless, living in an alley between two eco-efficient skyscrapers. Dust particles dance around her. She has lost ev

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Lost Prayer

      Feb 2, 2023

      A Lost Prayer
      10 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Play Dead

      Mar 3, 2020

      There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky,

      17 min read

    • Article

      The Coming Of The Tempest

      Sep 22, 2022

      The Coming Of The Tempest
      9 min read

    • Article

      Bridges

      Jul 17, 2022

      Bridges
      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘The End of the Day’: Featured Fiction from Bill Clegg

      Sep 30, 2020

      An excerpt from a novel Kirkus called "A moody, atmospheric domestic drama with a mystery novel somewhere in its family tree." The post ‘The End of the Day’: Featured Fiction from Bill Clegg appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      To Save Arrhinsal

      Sep 1, 2021

      TOLIN CRAWLED FORWARD, staying alert. All around, the dense, wiry thickets of the hedge were strangely silent. That usually meant danger, when the green tangle of thorns should be cheery with the songs of finches, the dusky clucking of hedge hens. On

      8 min read

    • Article

      Paper Princess

      Apr 1, 2023

      Paper Princess
      3 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      Floating

      Mar 11, 2019

      Floating
      14 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Apr 1, 2020

      Linden, age 9 Green Bay, WI Ophidia, the medusa, tried desperately to sketch a self-portrait. Later she would add color. Her problem was every time she looked into the lake at her reflection, the snakes of her hair were in a very different place. Sh

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Tears of the Jaguar

    4/5

    17 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      TEARS OF THE JAGUAR was a thriller that kept me on the edge of my seat and rapidly turning the pages to find out what was happening. And this was NOT a story where I saw the solution before the main character.I didn't like Deborah Miller very much when the book began. This museum curator who was sent to the Yucatan to oversee explorations at Ek Balam by her benefactor at Cornerstone who was funding her museum felt out of her depth and resentful of the archaeologist sent to survey the site. Her resentment and jealousy made her sharp tongued and not very likable. She has a bad relationship with her sister and mother because she felt her mother favored her sister and she resented her sister's athletic ability and the times she had to tag along to practices instead of being left alone to study. She was her father's daughter but now he is dead and her mother has remarried and is getting ready to sell the family home. This is another cause for her tension and resentment. The archaeologist - Bowerdale - isn't likable either. He is a pompous, blow hard who likes hitting on his female graduate assistants and doesn't pass up any opportunity to belittle Deborah. The graduate assistants are also shifty characters with Alice being sort of goth and liking to use her sexuality to get things from men. She prefers the abusive kind. James, the other graduate student, is sort of a puppy. He wants Alice's attention and is a sneaky sort of person. When a very heavy thunderstorm uncovers a previously hidden tomb, things change. All of a sudden Deborah needs to coordinate more archaeologists - all of whom are quirky, obsessed and more than a little weird. When the grave goods are stolen, it ignites a chase across Mexico and even to Lancashire England and brings in the CIA, MI5, a Serbian "entrepreneur" who wants to find the treasure to sell to the highest bidder, and someone who doesn't hesitate to leave a trail of bodies behind them.Once Deborah was on the hunt and following clues I began to like her better. I came to appreciate her intelligence and her bulldog-like persistence as she followed the trail of clues. I liked her enough to hunt down and buy two earlier books by the author that included Deborah Miller. This was a very compelling thriller that was a great story. I recommend it to thriller lovers.
    • 3/5
      "Tears of the Jaguar" is a decent archaeological thriller. It suffers from what many similar novels face: too much circling around multi-threaded plot points to give any of the sub-plots, and more importantly any of the characters, real depth and development. I enjoyed the core mystery that starts at an archaeological dig in the Yucatan, swings across the pond to England, before heading back to Mexico. Archaeologists discover a previously hidden chamber beneath a reconstructed pyramid at Ek Balam (a real site that's not far from Chichen Itza). Certain objects are discovered and then stolen...and off goes our plot to uncover who took the items, why, and what the items actually are.In the early chapters, author A.J. Hartley shows flashes of real character insight, but too quickly does he turn to cliche and jaded story elements. The characters that are jerks, start off jerky and end jerky. The conflicted protagonist starts off kind of confused and wishy-washy and doesn't progress much throughout the story. The distinct components that give a character life are all there. It's just that there's no subtly in their introduction, and no real growth or change in the qualities by the end of the book. Hartley does return a few times to themes tied to cultural heritage. Laws protect archaeological discoveries on behalf of the country in which they are found, not the finder. But what does a poor rural Maya care whether a find is protected for his country... especially when an object can be sold for many times ones annual wage. Likewise, Hartley touches on cultural bias as one Hispanic Mexican opines on his own bigoted perspective of the Maya Mexicans who live near the dig at Ek Balam. Hartley's writing is smooth and his plot moves quickly which makes the novel, at just over 400 pages, a fast read. He interconnects the discrete plot threads well, jumping seamlessly from character to character and creating suspense and that feeling of 'I’ll read just one more chapter before I go to bed'.This is a terrific 'beach' read (or, um, 'hayride' read since the Summer will be over by the time the book is released).I received this book through the Amazon Vine program.