Make No Bones - Softcover

Aaron Elkins is a former anthropologist and professor who has been writing mysteries and thrillers since 1982. His major continuing series features forensic anthropologist-detective Gideon Oliver, “the Skeleton Detective.” There are fifteen published titles to date in the series. The Gideon Oliver books have been (roughly) translated into a major ABC-TV series and have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Readers Digest Condensed Mystery Series. His work has been published in a dozen languages.
 Mr. Elkins won the 1988 Edgar Award for best mystery of the year for Old Bones, the fourth book in the Gideon Oliver Series. He and his cowriter and wife, Charlotte, also won an Agatha Award, and he has also won a Nero Wolfe Award. Mr. Elkins lives on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with Charlotte.

Oregon's anthropologist-sleuth Gideon Oliver (A Glancing Light, p. 566, etc.) and his park-ranger wife Julie are attending a conference of anthropologists at Whitebark Lodge, where ten years before Professor Albert Evan Jasper, undisputed top dog in the field, died in a fiery bus crash, at the end of another conference and amid rather mysterious circumstances. Several of the participants in that meeting are once again at Whitebark--one of them is Associate Professor Harlow Pollard, whose bludgeoned body is found in his cottage--the climax of a series of strange events seemingly tied to the past. Gideon cleverly solves the crucial element in that murder--the liveliest part of a sluggish story heavily laden with technical lore, all too rarely lightened with the author's finely honed sense of humor. Fans may be just a tad disappointed--for others, an unrewarding slog. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.