THE HUNGRY BONES

While she waits to hear the results of a job application in far-off Scotland, forensic odontologist Alexa Glock is pulled into several murders spanning more than a century on the South Island of New Zealand.

Alexa’s friend, forensic archaeologist Dr. Ana Luckenbaugh, wants her help in examining the newly exhumed remains of someone whom readers will assume from his interpolated letters home is Wing Lun, a miner who was drawn to Arrowtown by the late-19th-century gold rush and stayed until the boom had gone bust. So Alexa, who’s put her relationship with DI Bruce Horne on hiatus, happens to be on hand when Earl Hammer, the field hand who was convicted 25 years ago of killing Lakes District Cemetery volunteer Cindy Mulligan, is paroled, hacks off his tracking monitor, and goes AWOL. The town’s unease turns to terror when Arrowhead Primary School principal Eileen Bowen disappears, presumably because she’s become Hammer’s latest victim. Queenstown DI Pattie Katakana, the Māori detective in charge of the case, tells Alexa, “We don’t have time for old bones when a woman’s life is at stake.” But that’s exactly backward, since Alexa’s painstaking forensic work, which once again leaps outside her specialization in teeth to include the fingerprints that convicted Hammer of homicide, turns out to play a crucial role in explaining the deaths of Bowen, Mulligan, and Lun.

Even if these cases aren’t as closely linked as you might like, they’re all well worth your time.