Death Spoke

New Hard-Boiled Detective Series Uncovers Bones, Murder & History.

Paleontologist turned private investigator, Harry Przewalski, excavates the dirty underbelly of people's lives, unearthing sexual betrayals, treachery, fraud and murder buried beneath the science of petrified shards, skin and bones. Ultimately, he must face a brutal killing in his own past, when he fled to a desert war and came back with a gun and a license to detect.

In his second case, Death Spoke, the murder of an expert on prehistoric cave art immerses Przewalski in a famous painted cavern in France, a World War II atrocity, an archaeological fraud, and a diabolical act of revenge. Przewalski excavates the deadly archaeological layers of the case finding lives torn by deceit, vendetta and redemption.

As dean, Fulbright's ruthless academic politics brought power and deadly enemies. As an archaeologist, she and her academic adversaries are engaged in a bitter fight over the sudden appearance of magnificent cave art across southern France and Spain 32,000 years ago. Who ochred the luminous paintings of bison, deer, mammoths, and horses? And why? Her studies threatened to embarrass French cultural heritage and ruin professional careers--the art in one of the most famous caves was likely forged in the 1950s to attract tourists. Equally explosive is a bold theory that the cave artists were not hunters or shamans, but outcasts who retreated into the deepest recesses of the caves, driven by their precocious talent and psychological isolation.

The second installment in the Harry Przewalski series. The first book in the series is The Bone Field.