Elkins, Aaron

Gideon Oliver, Skeleton Detective books

Note:  I recently found that I had overlooked several of Aaron Elkins' books, so this page will be updated as I finish reading them.  In addition to the Gideon Oliver books, I found two of his Chris Norgren books and one of the Lee Ofstead books he wrote with his wife Charlotte, so I'll be updating that page, too.

Update:  Anthropologist Gideon Oliver, still grieving the death of his wife Nora, has taken an overseas post teaching at American military bases in Europe in Fellowship of Fear.  When he arrives in Germany, he learns that the two previous occupants of the fellowship have either died or mysteriously disappeared.  Gideon soon finds himself caught up in international espionage.  I wasn't too thrilled with the spy stuff, but loved the descriptions of places I had been in Germany, especially Heidelberg.  Grade:  B.  

Update: The Dark Place finds Gideon Oliver in the Olympic Rain Forest, the only rain forest in the northern hemisphere, to examine the skeletal remains believed to be hikers who had disappeared in the forest several years earlier.  The puzzling thing is that one of the bodies appears to have been killed by something wielding a bone spear point with superhuman strength, so of course when word of this gets out, the Sasquatch enthusiasts invade the forest in great numbers.  Grade:  A.

Honeymooning in England in Murder In The Queen's Armes, anthropologist Gideon Oliver, known as the Skeleton Detective, visits a small museum in Dorset, only to discover that the 30 thousand year old skull fragment of Poundbury Man, known among anthropologists as "Pummy", has been stolen from the museum.  When Pummy turns up again on the site of a dig being conducted a few miles away by a friend of Gideon's, murder ensues.  I like the fact that Elkins uses knowledge from his own career as a physical anthropologist in his mysteries, but manages to keep it reasonably accessible for the reader.  Grade:  B.  

Gideon Oliver thought accompanying his wife Julie to Alaska for a training class for park rangers at a remote lodge would be a nice vacation, but finds himself bored out of his mind, at least until human bones are released from the Icy Clutches of a nearby glacier.  When Gideon is asked to determine whether the bones are those of a team of botanists killed in an avalanche thirty years before, he finds that they are, but that at least one of the team was murdered.  Complicating this is the presence of the sole survivor of the avalanche, prominent television scientist M. Audley Tremaine, two other scientists who were on the expedition, and a group of the relatives of the three people killed in the avalanche.  When Tremaine is killed and the manuscript of his "tell all" book stolen, it appears that the killer is among those present at the lodge. Grade:  B.  

Update:  Make No Bones finds Gideon, Julie and FBI agent John Lau traveling to Bend, Oregon, for the Albert Evan Jasper Memorial Bone Bash, Weenie Roast and Chug-a-lug contest, AKA the Western Association of Forensic Anthropologists biennial conference.  Highlight of the conference is to be the installation of the few skeletal remains of Jasper himself, killed ten years before in a flaming bus crash.  One problem: the remains are promptly stolen from the display case, and the chief suspects are the founding members of the WAFA.  Grade:  A.

Gideon and his friend FBI agent John Lau travel to Tahiti to the plantation where members of John's extended family grow Paradise's Blue Devil, the world's most expensive coffee, at the invitation John's uncle to investigate the suspicious death of a family member in Twenty Blue Devils.  Except that when they get there, they're told they're not needed, nothing to investigate, nothing to see here, thank you.  Naturally, this does not sit well with either Gideon or John.  Grade:  B.  

On vacation in Hawaii, Gideon is invited by John Lau to meet members of the Torkelson family, old friends of his who own one of the largest cattle ranches on the Big Island of Hawaii in Where There's A Will.  The gathering is interrupted by the news that an airplane, missing for ten years, has been discovered in a lagoon on a remote Pacific atoll, and is believe to contain the remains of Magnus Torkelson, missing since anonymous hit men killed his brother Torkel and burned down the ranch hay barn to conceal the crime.  At least that's the story the family is telling, until it isn't.  Grade:  B. 

 Gideon makes a joking comment to a reporter that his upcoming speech to promote his new book about archeological scams, hoaxes and frauds will reveal an even bigger fraud than that of Piltdown Man; the reporter takes the comment seriously and spreads the news worldwide so that all the attendees at a conference celebrating the discovery of Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy are expecting great revelations from him in Uneasy Relations.  Gideon himself tries to downplay it, until someone tries to push him off the Rock of Gibraltar.  Grade: B.  

Although Aaron Elkins gets sole authorship credit for the Chris Norgren books, I'm putting them in the post with the Alix London books where his wife art historian wife Charlotte gets co-authorship credit.  

Susan Dunlap

In Susan Dunlap's Karma, published in 1981, Officer Jill Smith is a recently divorced member of the Berkeley, California, police force attending a ceremony conducted by the new guru in town, when he is stabbed to death in full view of the audience.  Since the area is part of her beat, Smith goes to work on the case immediately, trying to sort out the motives of the various characters around the dead monk.  As the case progresses, she begins to wonder if anyone is really what they seem to be.  Having lived in the Bay Area in the 1980's myself, I enjoyed the portrait of that diverse area.  Grade:  B.  

Officer Jill Smith's ex-husband Nat calls and asks As A Favor that Jill check on one of his co-workers, Anne Spaulding, who has not come to work at the Berkeley Welfare Office.  When Jill goes to Anne's apartment, she finds signs of a struggle, overturned furniture, blood on the walls and floor, and the missing woman's purse and drivers license.  Blood stained clothing has been turned in at the police station, suggesting that a body has been dumped into San Francisco Bay.  As Jill investigates, however, an unflattering portrait of Anne Spaulding begins to emerge, as does a very fresh corpse, and Jill begins to wonder exactly how Nat may be involved.  These books tend to be police procedurals, although I have a lot of trouble believing that proper procedure was followed toward the end of the book when Jill goes to arrest the suspect without waiting for backup.  Still, I'd give it a solid Grade:  B.  

In Not Exactly a Brahmin, newly minted Homicide Division detective Jill Smith is driving down the street when she comes on the site of a recent automobile accident that turns out not to be so accidental--the car's brake lines have been tampered with, making this a murder scene.  The victim, a wealthy Berkeley philanthropist, was involved in many charitable organizations and seemed to have no enemies.  The only clues are a piece of paper found in the car that says "Shareholders Five", and the suspicious behavior of the widow.  Grade:  B.  

 Homicide detective Jill Smith helps paralyzed disability activist Liz Goldenstern get home in her wheelchair; hours later Liz is found drowned in a puddle of water miles away in Rainbow Village, a homeless encampment near the site of an apartment building Liz is involved in building in Too Close To The Edge.  A cut seatbelt on Liz's wheelchair shows this was no accident, but murder.  Once again Smith has to sort out the motives and emotions of a wide variety of characters.  Grade:  B.  

Jill Smith finds that the Berkeley "Gourmet Ghetto" can be a dangerous place when a celebrity restaurateur is poisoned in his own restaurant in A Dinner To Die For.  Was it a potential business competitor, an employee, or a well known local street person known as Earth Man?  As usual, Jill has a variety of motives and relationships to sort through.  Grade:  B.  

When Jill Smith is called to the scene of an alleged felonious assault in Diamond In The Buff, she finds that the victim is dentist Hasbrouck Diamond, known to the Berkeley PD as "Has-bitched" for his frequent complaints.  The alleged assailant is a ten-foot long Eucalyptus branch from a tree belonging to his next door neighbor, who he alleges has weakened the branch so that it would fall on him while he was indulging in nude sunbathing on his deck.  When the neighbor disappears and a corpse appears, the situation ceases to be comical.  Grade:  B.  

When an aggressive IRS agent is murdered in Death And Taxes, few Berkeley residents struggling to finish their Form 1040s in time are able to express much sorrow at his demise, and the scene is crowded with potential suspects, including participants in a macabre game called the Death Game.  Grade:  B.

As a trained hostage negotiator, Detective Jill Smith is called to the scene in Time Expired where witnesses have reported a woman being dragged into a canyon.  At the scene, the team finds evidence that the perpetrator may have been involved in an escalating series of pranks directed at the Berkeley Police Department's parking enforcement agents.  Interviewing potential witnesses leads her to dying attorney Madeline Riordan, who has a long history of challenging the police, and who clearly has something on her mind, but before she can tell Jill, she is murdered.  Grade:  B.  

These are all the Susan Dunlap books I have; I'm not sure I will ever read these again, but I found them entertaining enough to give them a grade of B.  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 What is there left to say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?  A Study In Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced both Holmes and his chronicler, Dr. John Watson to the reading public and also introduced the public to the idea of the application of scientific methods to the study of crime.   For those reasons, I would give A Study In Scarlet a B, although this time around I found Doyle's American narrative and language more irritating than entertaining.  Grade:  B.   

The Hound of the Baskervilles still gets an A, though.  I first read it when I was about twelve years old; my mother caught me reading it late at night and made me turn out my light before I found out that the hound was a real dog and not a demonic apparition, and I couldn't sleep for envisioning a spectral hound slathering at my bedroom door.  Well plotted, well written, it still gets Grade:  A.  

I also re-read the short stories collected by Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle in A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, which were published over the years in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes.   After the first several books of Holmes stories, Doyle apparently tired of writing them and decided to kill Holmes off.  To accomplish this, he introduced the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty in the story "The Final Problem", in which he has Holmes, pursued across Europe by Moriarty, grapple with Moriarty on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, with the result that both men apparently fell to their death.  Later, bowing to public pressure and financial needs, Doyle resurrected Holmes in "The Problem of the Empty House", in which Holmes reveals that Watson had misinterpreted the confused footprints on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls and that Holmes had climbed up to fake his own death.  This never made much sense to me because it's apparent during the course of the story that Moriarty's chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran knew from the start that Holmes was still alive as he dislodged boulders above him in an attempt to kill Holmes then and there, so why the need to pretend to the rest of the world that he was dead?  

At any rate, it was a very satisfying exercise to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Grade:  A overall.  

R. B. Dominic

The writing team of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart, who usually wrote under the pen name Emma Lathen, also wrote a series of mysteries under the pen name R. B. Dominic between 1968 and 1983.  This series is set in Washington, D. C. and stars Congressman Ben Safford (D., Ohio) and his Congressional colleagues.  Although they wrote seven novels as Dominic, I only have three of them.  

As they did when writing as Lathen, the authors incorporate contemporary events and themes into their plots.  Murder In High Place gets Congressman Safford involved in the affairs of an unstable Latin American country as he tries to untangle the relationship between one of his hot-headed constituents and U.S. government departments that provide aid to that country.  This book involves the meticulous plotting and background research characteristic of Emma Lathen's work, but this book seemed to plod along with no trace of the wicked humor of the John Putnam Thatcher books, and I missed that.  Grade:  C.  

Safford gets involved with the Atomic Energy Commission in Murder Out Of Commission when a powerful utility company wants to build a nuclear power plant in a small town in his Congressional district.  Most of the residents are in favor of it, hoping the construction and other jobs it will bring in will revitalize the town, but activist residents of a wealthy neighboring town fear the potential consequences of a reactor safety failure.  Grade:  C.

The subcommittee Ben Safford is on is holding hearings around the country on Medicade fraud in The Attending Physician (1980) and Ben is chagrined to find that his Ohio district is next on the list to investigate fraudulent billings by seven local doctors.   This book reminded me of Emma Lathen's A Stitch In Time, written in 1968, where doctors were again the chief suspects in a variety of criminal activities.  Grade:  C.

Margaret Doody

 Margaret Doody's Aristotle Detective has been on my bookshelf for years and I am heartily sorry I never got around to reading it before this; it's a corker of a mystery novel set in Classical Greece.   Stephanos, a young man of about 22, is out for an early morning stroll when he comes upon a scene of confusion at the house of wealthy and prominent Boutades.  The man has just been discovered shot to death with an arrow through the throat.  Worse yet, Stephanos' exiled cousin Philemon is soon accused of the murder, even though he has not been seen in Athens since he fled two years before to escape a manslaughter rap for killing a man in a fight.  To make matters even worse, Philemon is also accused of having fought for the hated Persians against Alexander's Greek and Macedonian forces.

As the only adult male in the family, Stephanos is tasked with defending Philemon during the legal inquiry into Boutades's death; feeling inadequate to the job, he consults his former teacher, Aristotle.  With Stephanos doing most of the legwork and Aristotle feeding him questions and ideas to pursue, they are ultimately able to clear Philemon of the charge and reveal the real murderer.  Grade:  A+

Hildegard Dolson

 When Grace Dilworth, newly liberated following the death of her domineering father, returns from a cruise with a handsome young "art expert" in tow, tongues in stuffy Wingate, Connecticut, wag.  And when the young man is found impaled on the spears of the sculpture he and Grace have installed in the former rose garden of the Dilworth Arts and Crafts Center in A Dying Fall, septuagenarian Lucy Ramsdale and retired Inspector James McDougal must sort it out.  Lucy is entertaining as an amateur detective, but a little of her goes a long way.  Grade:  B.

Lucy is at it again in Please Omit Funeral.  She's invited an old friend, actress Alison Moffat, for the weekend and the two of them attend a party at the home of author Lawrence Dilman, renowned for his scandalous novel, Wayward The World, which has recently been the victim of a book burning by the self-appointed local morals guardian Georgina Hampter.  The party is rife with people who would like to murder Dilman, so it's not a surprise when someone does.  Grade:  B.  

 

Eilis Dillon

 I started to read Eilis Dillon's Death At Crane's Court, but remembered that there is some killing of cats that bothered me the first time I read it, so decided not to read it again.  As I recall, the characters were interesting, but I felt it was just too upsetting to read this time around.  Grade: D for that alone.

Sent To His Account is more to my liking.  Dublin accountant Miles de Cogan, who has come down in the world from the prosperous days of his youth, is astonished to find out that a cousin has died and left him sole heir to an estate and a small fortune.  When local bigwig Thomas Reid is found poisoned in Miles' drawing room, Miles and Inspector Pat Henley, son of one of Miles' former accounting clients, have to sort through local squabbles and intrigue to solve the mystery.  Grade:  A.  

Death in the Quadrangle finds Professor Daly, who appeared in Death At Crane's Court, back at his college in Dublin ostensibly to deliver a series of lectures.  In fact, the President of the college wants him to find out who has been sending him anonymous letters and who may try to kill him.  Before Daly and his old friend Inspector Mike Kenny can even begin, someone does actually kill the man, and suspects appear thick on the ground.  Grade:  B.