I received the Cortez book from Amazon yesterday.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the book is quite substantial. It's a self-published book, I'd guess that USGames just bought out the author's stock and put a USGames sticker on it. The book is very nicely printed in red and black ink.
At first I had assumed that Freeman illustrated the cards based on his daughter's ideas, but no, it's the other way around. Freeman spent decades studying playing cards and drawing several versions of decks. Then his daughter came along and developed the material in the book through research and discussions with her father.
Phoenix Rising, I think you're right that the card meanings are similar to Olney/Camp. At first I didn't think so, but when I carefully compared them, there are enough similarities in enough cards that it's clear that Olney/Camp was at least one influence. There are lots of cards, though, that don't follow Olney/Camp.
The author writes well, and I think I'll enjoy this book. It also contains mythological stories, poetry, and essays by her father, C.J. Freeman. Cortez seems to have put a lot of thought and reseach into the book, and it's a pleasure to see someone take the subject so seriously. The writing has a very psychological/spiritual cast, and the writing style reminds me of the Mythic Tarot book, which I also liked a lot.
She concentrates on four-card layouts, but describes various methods of examining the four-card spread in depth. There are a few other layouts, and then she describes a rather complicated year-long, 16-card spread, and then a diagram called the Mystic Square (which looks a bit like a Vedic astrology chart) on which to tabulate the results of the spread.
The geomancy comes in with an examination of 16 geometric figures which are used to examine the four-card spread, using color, number, astrological planets, and elements.
As tarobones has noted, you don't need to use the Cortez deck, you can just use an ordinary playing-card deck. All of Freeman's card illustrations are given in the book, so if you want to, you can use the images as mnemonic tools to help remember the meanings, even if you're using an ordinary deck, or you can choose to just follow the text and not use the images.
The titles and names used in this project are a little confusing. The book is called "The Playing Card Oracles: A Source Book for Divination" by Ana Cortez. The deck itself is called, bewilderingly, "The Picture Book of Ana Cortez" by C.J. Freeman. In the book, Freeman refers to his daughter as Ana, but the copyright page lists the copyright holder of the book as Tracy Freeman. And to top it all off, the illustration for the Ace of Clubs bears the words "The Picture Book of Madame Zo."
Arrgh, a new element-suit correlation to learn:
Diamonds = Fire
Clubs = Air
Hearts = Water
Spades = Earth
-- Lee