Cities of Gold
Set both in 1989 and 1549, but almost entirely in the American Southwest, this tells the story, supported by extracts of actual primary-source documents, of the real-life Fra Marcos de Niza, who journeyed north from Mexico into what is now Arizona in search of the “Seven Cities of Cibola.” Though de Niza has long been considered by historians to have been a liar and fraud, through the mouthpiece of his protagonist, Kevin Scott, a city planner working for a ruthless real-estate speculator, Hartmann presents a compelling alternate theory: that de Niza, like the idealistic and overly-ingenuous Scott, was merely the impotent victim of the appetites and agendas of others, and the reports he made of what he found on his journey north from Mexico were completely true.
While Scott’s naïveté about how real estate development and Arizona politics work may be a bit much for the reader to swallow at times, the story of how he is recruited to work in Rooney’s organization, falls in love with Phaedra, Rooney’s secretary, is set to work researching de Niza, and slowly becomes obsessed by the historical record, is interesting enough to frame the more-engrossing story of de Niza’s quest for Cibola and provide a counterpoint to it.
