A paleontologist-turned-private detective is hired to find a missing archaeologist.

Peter Marchand is leading a dig for dinosaur fossils in the badlands of Wyoming. When he suddenly vanishes, his employer, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, asks private eye Harry Przewalski to find him. Harry heads for Wyoming and discovers a dearth of clues, intricate and sordid gossip, and a team of paleontologists, each of whom seems to have a motive to kill Peter, who is known for his scientific opposition to biblical creationism and received a death threat from a fundamentalist Christian group. Furthermore, one of his students, David Jacobs, reveals that he is a devoted creationist, and that he infiltrated the program partly to push his religious agenda. Peter was also known for his promiscuity, and he left museum curator Diana Palantier for one of his younger students, Lynn Calvert. Lynn expected Peter to trade her in, too, especially after rumors were swirling all over town about his romantic dalliance with the wife of a major landowner running for governor. And there’s also a dash of professional rivalry: Edwin Simeon, a lesser-known colleague, accuses Peter of plagiarizing some of his most controversial ideas. Meanwhile, Harry grapples with his own traumatic past—when he was Peter’s student, Harry’s girlfriend was brutally raped and murdered, which still haunts him. Author Krishtalka (Dinosaur Plots and Other Intrigues in Natural History, 1989), a real-life professional paleontologist employed by the Carnegie Museum, clearly shows his impressive knowledge of the field throughout this work. In many respects, it’s a formulaic murder mystery, replete with a hard-boiled detective consistently delivering nuggets of cynical insight. However, the author manages to enliven the genre, not only with the paleontological slant, but also by highlighting a strain of professional resentment specifically found in academia. The major theme of the novel is the relentless pursuit of truth, and the author executes it intelligently. As a reporter remarks: “We’re alike, Harry...journalists...paleontologists...detectives. We dig up what history tries to bury.”

A fresh, intellectually lively take on an old mystery blueprint.

A cerebral detective investigates the killing of a renowned archaeologist who may have stumbled on a major case of academic fraud in this sequel. 

Joyce Fulbright is a dean at the University of Kansas and an academic superstar, famous for her research on prehistoric art left scrawled in the caves of France. When she’s murdered, all eyes immediately turn to her colleague and furtive lover, Dr. James Porter, who quickly admits to their affair but vehemently denies killing her. Still, the evidence so strongly implicates him—his hair and semen were found on the scene, and his skin under Fulbright’s fingernails—that even Porter’s own lawyer takes his guilt for granted. Porter hires private eye Harry Przewalski to investigate, a hard-boiled veteran who was once deployed to Iraq, and so uncommonly erudite he impresses even the scholars he meets. Harry quickly determines that the list of those with a motive to kill Fulbright is long—she treated her associates with despotic disdain and even blackmailed some for sexual favors. As one colleague of Fulbright’s puts it, referring to an academic excursion that she attended: “Christ, half the faculty on that bus would have loved to suffocate the bitch.” Krishtalka (The Bone Field, 2018, etc.), continuing a series that chronicles Harry’s exploits, skillfully mixes a murder mystery with an intricate tale of academic intrigue and historical drama. Harry discovers that Fulbright had scholarly reasons to suspect that the art in one particular cave in France in a village named Rouffignac is fraudulent and at the site of an unspeakable atrocity during World War II.  At the heart of the author’s astonishingly clever tale—both intelligently conceived and executed—is the protagonist. Harry is slyly intellectual, lacks pretension, and harbors a profound storehouse of pain belied by his emotional reticence. Some of the author’s best writing in the book—his prose is consistently sharp and illustrative—describes Harry’s quiet torment. Consider this passage that eloquently captures the traumatic fallout of his mother’s debilitating illness: “Harry had felt his father shrink from the stealth of Emilia’s decay, from her no longer knowing who is me and who is them and who is us. They would come upon Emilia rehearsing her life from a list she’d written on a piece of paper.” And while the plot flirts with implausibility, given the introduction of an unlikely coincidence that weaves Emilia into Harry’s investigation of the crime, it remains grippingly suspenseful. In addition, Krishtalka provides a scathing peek into the venal corridors of academic life and its petty power struggles over professional status. Fulbright emerges as a tantalizingly complex figure, capable of grotesque displays of immorality, but still moved by a principled attachment to the truth, a commitment sometimes interred under the small-minded squabbles of scholarly life. The author provides the best this genre has to offer: a riveting exploration of a crime blended with a deeply stirring examination of human nature. 

A cinematically immersive murder mystery deftly combined with an intellectual drama. 

In Krishtalka’s (Death Spoke, 2019, etc.) third mystery-series installment, a private detective and former paleontologist investigates a bizarre incident with a complex historical pedigree. 

At Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, a well-known historical diorama—Arab Courier Attacked by Lions, “one of America’s cultural treasures”—has been torn apart by someone who also attacked the exhibit’s guard. The assailant then sliced open the belly of the taxidermic camel and took something that, upon inspection, appears to have been the mummified remains of a small, female child. Without any clear suspect or motive for the crime, the police call in Harry Przewalski, a private investigator who once worked at the museum as a paleontologist; after a series of personal misfortunes, he’d joined the military and “fled to the violent solitude of a desert war.” Liza Kole, another paleontologist and who has also been Harry’s romantic partner in the past, informs him that the art installation was created, to great fanfare, 150 years ago by Jules Verreaux; he was known as the “finest taxidermist in France”—one with the skills to “give immortality” to the dead. Anna Storck, the museum’s physical anthropologist, commits suicide only two days after the vandalism, and police believe that the two events are unconnected. But Harry, in his inimitable style, is skeptical: “Yeah, well, in our business coincidence could be a fact just waiting for an equation.” He soon finds that Verreaux had seduced and impregnated a Elisabeth Greef, Dutch woman, in Capetown, South Africa, and when he abandoned her, she “sued him for betrayal.” The child inside the camel could have been hers—and the vandalism, an act of revenge.  Over the course of this novel, Krishtalka artfully conjures the grim life of the prodigiously talented Verreaux. The taxidermist is such a sordid character that there were indeed multiple reasons why someone one would want to take revenge upon him—even a century and a half after he’d created his diorama. Throughout, the author presents the evidence with great skill: Verreaux’s journals, the letters between him and Elisabeth, and detailed accounts of the trial in which she sued him for breach of contract are all revealed to connect to the modern-day mystery. Krishtalka’s prose is powerfully versatile, alternating between the sort of terse, unsentimental phrasing that one would expect from a detective story and poetical elegance. At one point, for example, when Harry sees a pencil sketch of Elisabeth, he finds himself swept away: “For a moment, Harry was lost in the damp heat of her bed, that angular face fierce in love or revenge, the full lips primed to kiss or slay, the wild hair on the pillow exploding in fervor or fury, the bare back arched in rapture or revolt, the long legs in ecstasy or constriction.” Harry’s own life also poignantly reveals duality, but his is a tug of war between painful memories and a longing to rejoin the land of the living. 

A fiercely intelligent crime drama as emotionally sharp as it is historically inventive. 

A reporter investigates a murder and a lurid web of deceit in this historical novel set in the late 19th century.

Isaac Ruthman suddenly dies in Lawrence, Kansas, under peculiar circumstances—to witnesses, he seemed perfectly healthy. He leaves a note that complains of a “terrible sensation of a rush of blood to the head, and my skin burns and itches” due to medication. His wife, Kate, takes it for granted that he chose suicide, but there are reasons to believe she’s conducting an affair with his doctor, John Medlicott, an illicit tryst Isaac discovered. In addition, Isaac recently took out a hefty life insurance policy, of which Kate is the sole beneficiary. Moreover, Medlicott’s wife, Sarah, recently died under similarly suspicious conditions, a demise that resulted in a financial windfall for the physician. Neighbor Mary Fanning—her name by marriage is Apitz, which she loathes—takes an interest in the case and lands a job at the Kansas Daily Tribune, making her the “first woman journalist west of the Mississippi.” She is a nearly feral force of nature, powerfully depicted by Krishtalka—consider Mary’s announcement to her new employer at the newspaper, John Speer: “My credentials are excellent. From Shakespeare and Chaucer I learned the state of man. From Darwin I learned the descent of man—his book was published three months ago. From Lincoln I learned the equality of man.” A toxicology report confirms that Isaac died from the ingestion of poison—two, in fact—but that hardly settles the case. Both he and Kate have dark romantic pasts, and at least two men could have been motivated to murder Isaac. They include Harold Bennett, the husband of a woman Isaac seduced, and Seymour Voullaire, Kate’s former husband and the man from whom Isaac won her affections.

Krishtalka’s tale is impeccably researched—he brings this sordid succession of events and the American South in the wake of the Civil War into vividly sharp relief. The plot is an exceedingly complex one, so much so it sometimes flirts with convolution, and keeping track of every twist and turn can become a trial of readers’ patience. Yet there is something irrepressibly tantalizing about the lascivious tableau painted by the author—a compelling nihilism. And the story unfolds with all the virtues of a conventional crime drama: titillating suspense and an astonishingly unpredictable narrative arc. Still, the heart and soul of the novel is Mary, a defiant suffragist locked in a loveless marriage who maintains a passionate lesbian affair with Julie Newman, a similarly frustrated woman way ahead of her time. Mary can turn even a discussion of her name in court into a declaration of independence: “Your Honor, if I may, I appreciate your consideration. ‘Fanning’ is what I prefer. Yet ‘Correspondent Fanning’ is too awkward. And ‘Miss Fanning’ would be inaccurate. With all due respect to the married ladies here, the term ‘Mrs.’ subsumes our independence. It is high time womanhood had a salutation that is free of marital status.”

A thrilling tale of murder and betrayal.