Zencey so masterfully melds history with fiction in Panama, several of his critics noted difficulty with separating historical fact from fictional details. This mixture of fact and fiction was one Henry Adams himself attempted. In his essay, "The Contemporary Relevance of Henry Adams," Zencey explains that Adams wrote a "complex tale of [Tahiti's] genealogies, presented as the firstperson memoirs of Marau Taaroa, the queen of Tahiti." Zencey says that, "in her memoirs Adams was exploring the median between history and fiction." While Adams did visit Panama in 1892 on his way to visit John Hay in France, and at the time various deputies, or chequards, were identified as having been bribed in the French attempt to build a canal in Panama, the events surrounding Miriam Talbott and Louise Martin are purely fictional.

Panama could be placed in the detective genre along with the historical genre. Whereas the beginning of...