Aaron Elkins
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When anthropology professor Gideon Oliver is offered a teaching fellowship at US military bases in Germany, Sicily, Spain, and Holland, he wastes no time accepting. Stimulating courses to teach, a decent stipend, all expenses paid, plenty of interesting European travel . . . What's not to like? It does not take him long to find out. On his first night, he is forced to fend off two desperate, black-clad men who have invaded his Heidelberg hotel room...
2) Icy Clutches
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Gideon Oliver expects to be amicably bored when he takes on the role of "accompanying spouse" at a lodge in the magnificent wild country of Glacier Bay, Alaska, where his forest ranger wife, Julie, is attending a conference. But it turns out to be exactly his cup of tea. There is another group at the lodge: six scientists on a memorial journey to the site of a thirty-year-old glacial avalanche that killed three of their colleagues. Their leader is...
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The dead man is the manager of Tahiti's Paradise Coffee Plantation, producer of the most expensive coffee bean in the world, the winey, luscious Blue Devil. Nothing tangible points to foul play behind his fall from a cliff, but FBI agent John Lau, a relative of the coffee-growing family, has his suspicions. What he needs is evidence, and who better to provide it than his friend, anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective? Gideon is willing...
4) Old Bones
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Winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery novel of the year. With the roar of thunder and the speed of a galloping horse comes the tide to Mont St. Michel goes the old nursery song. So when the aged patriarch of the du Rocher family falls victim to the perilous tide, even the old man's family accepts the verdict of accidental drowning. But too quickly, this "accident" is followed by a bizarre discovery in the ancient du Rocher chateau:...
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There is not much left of the irascible Albert Evan Jasper, "dean of American forensic anthropologists," after his demise in a fiery car crash. But in accord with his wishes, his remains-a few charred bits of bone-are installed in an Oregon museum to create a fascinating if macabre exhibit. All agree that it is a fitting end for a great forensic scientist-until what is left of him disappears in the midst of the biannual meeting (a.k.a., the "bone...
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Anthropology professor Gideon Oliver would prefer to keep his mind on his beautiful new bride Julie during their English honeymoon, but one intrusive question will not stop nagging at him: Who would want to steal a thirty-thousand-year-old parieto-occipital calvarial fragment? Yet someone has lifted this chunk of prehistoric human skull from a musty museum in Dorchester. Then, thirty miles away, an archaeology student is murdered, increasing tension...
7) Old Scores
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It is a headline-making story: the discovery of a previously unknown Rembrandt. René Vachey, the iconoclastic art dealer who claims to have uncovered it, wants to make a gift of it to the Seattle Art Museum, but curator Chris Norgren is wary. Vachey is notorious in art circles for perpetrating scandalous shams; not for profit but for the sheer fun of embarrassing the elite and snobbish "experts" of the art establishment. And thanks to the web of...
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Deep in the primeval rainforest of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, the skeletal remains of a murdered man are discovered. And a strange, unsettling tale begins to unfold, for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver determines that the murder weapon was a primitive bone spear of a type not seen for the last ten thousand years. And whoever-or whatever-hurled it did so with seemingly superhuman force. Bigfoot "sightings" immediately crop up, but...
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An ancient skeleton tossed in a garbage dump is the first conundrum to rattle Gideon Oliver when he arrives in Egypt. There to appear in a documentary film, he expects an undemanding week of movie star treatment and a luxurious cruise up the Nile with his wife, Julie. But when Gideon discovers a tantalizing secret in the discarded bones-and violence claims a famous Egyptologist's life-he is thrust into a spotlight of a different kind. Plying his calipers...
10) Curses!
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Mayan ruins in the Yucatán . . . a secret room in a tomb . . . age-old skeletons. To anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the renowned Skeleton Detective, the invitation to join the archaeological excavation of Tlaloc promises two months of paradise on Earth. That is, until an ancient series of Mayan curses against desecrators of the site is unearthed. When the first one comes to pass ("The bloodsucking kinkajou will come freely among them"), it is taken...
11) Turncoat
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Pete Simon's all-American life was everything he ever wanted: a good home, a satisfying career, and a marriage still strong and loving after nearly twenty years. But in the days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, everything is about to change. It starts with the appearance of an old man at his door, ranting madly about money, death, and forgiveness. The man is a stranger to Pete-but not to his wife, Lily. Only later does the truth come...
12) Skeleton Dance
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Les-Eyzies-de-Tayac is known for three things: pâté de fois gras, truffles, and prehistoric remains. The little village, in fact, is the headquarters of the prestigious Institute de Préhistoire, which studies the abundant local fossils. But when a pet dog emerges from a nearby cave carrying parts of a human skeleton-by no means a fossilized one-Chief Inspector Lucien Anatole Joly puts in a call to his old friend, Gideon Oliver, the famed "Skeleton...
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Chris Norgren, museum curator and Renaissance art expert, heads to Berlin to assist in mounting a sensational exhibit: The Plundered Past-twenty priceless Old Masters looted by the Nazis, thought for decades to be lost forever, and only recently rediscovered. But things quickly get out of hand when Chris's patrician, fastidious boss, after smelling a forgery in the lot, turns up dead the very next day-on the steps of a dismal Frankfurt brothel, of...
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Fellowship of Fear: Gideon accepts a teaching fellowship at US military bases in Europe-without knowing the previous two fellowship holders met mysterious ends. Now caught up in a dangerous game, this professor will need to think fast in order to survive. The Dark Place: Gideon is in Washington's Olympic National Park and must make sense of skeletal remains, a primitive bone spear murder weapon, and alleged Bigfoot sightings before a relentless killer...
15) A Glancing Light
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Mild-mannered and law-abiding, Chris Norgren, curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Seattle Art Museum, is an unlikely undercover investigator, but when a priceless Rubens portrait is discovered in a shipment of "authentic reproductions" in a local warehouse, Chris is pressed into service to find out how it got there. The quest leads him to the medieval city of Bologna, one of his favorite places, but all too soon what might have been a welcome...
16) Loot
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In April 1945, the Nazis, reeling and near defeat, frantically work to hide the huge store of art treasures that Hitler has looted from Europe. Truck convoys loaded with the cultural wealth of the Western world pour in an unending stream into the compound of the vast Altaussee salt mine high in the Austrian Alps. But with the Allies closing in, the vaunted efficiency of the Nazis has broken down. At Altaussee, all is tumult and confusion. In the commotion,...
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When Gideon Oliver and his wife, Julie, are in Tuscany visiting the Cubbiddu family, the renowned Skeleton Detective is asked to reexamine the remains of a mysterious family tragedy. Pietro Cubbiddu, former patriarch of the Villa Antica wine empire, is thought to have killed his wife and then himself in the remote mountains of the Apennines. It does not take long for Gideon to deduce that, whatever happened, a murder-suicide it was not.
Soon Gideon...
18) Skull Duggery
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Gideon is happy to be in Mexico with his wife-until he's asked to examine the mummified corpse of a drifter thought to be shot to death. Gideon's findings reveal that the cause of death is far more bizarre. Then he's asked to examine the skeleton of a murder victim found a year earlier-only to discover another coroner error. The Skeleton Detective knows that two "mistakenly" identified bodies are never a coincidence. But if he isn't careful, unearthing...
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Edgar® Award-winning author Aaron Elkins's creation, forensics professor Gideon Oliver, unearths a wealthy family's darkest secrets . . .
Alex Torkelsson has just gotten word: his late uncle Magnus's plane has been found south of Hawaii's Big Island after ten long years. So too have Magnus's few skeletal remains, now handed over to the only man who can fit together the pieces of this mystery . . .
What forensic detective Gideon Oliver discovers...
20) Good Blood
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What was supposed to be an Italian vacation for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver and his wife turns into a busman's holiday when their hosts' only child goes missing-and nearby construction workers unearth human bones. The family awaits Oliver's conclusions with both dread and cautious hope. But along the way, he'll expose some extraordinary deceptions that lay bare the long-hidden secrets at the dark heart of a highborn family.