The Bone Field

Paleontologist Krishtalka (Dinosaur Plots) puts his professional experience to good use in his satisfyingly twisty fiction debut, a series launch featuring Pittsburgh PI Harry Przewalski. Harry was once a paleontology graduate student at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, until a personal tragedy caused him to abandon his dissertation and enlist in the U.S. Army; he “escaped to a war, came back with a gun and got a license to detect.” His academic background provides Harry with an advantage when the Carnegie Museum’s director hires him to look into the disappearance of Peter Marchand, one of the institution’s curators. Marchand, who was notorious for having proposed “radical theories about changes in the Earth’s climate during the Age of Dinosaurs,” vanished 10 days earlier from a fossil-hunting expedition in Wyoming. There’s one clue: the previous spring, Marchand received a threat from a Christian fundamentalist. In Wyoming, Harry exposes multiple suspects before he astutely sorts out what had happened to Marchand. This is a promising start to what is shaping up to be an intriguing series. [em](BookLife) [/em]